Published by Penguin / Everyman’s Library, first published in 1871-72, 364 pages.

Welcome to Middlemarch: an English town in the Midlands, during the late 1800s, home to dreamers, idealists, people trying to remake themselves, and people on the make. They represent a cross-section of society: landowners, traders, estate managers, artists, clerics and workers. The people in the town know each other—and sometimes have a profound effect on the lives of those around them.

I am not going to go into great detail about the plot—it is very complex, with so many lives intersecting each other. There are two main threads to this book: the stories of Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Tertius Lydgate.

Dorothea and her sister Celia have been living with their uncle, Arthur Brooke, after the death of their parents. The two sisters are close but very different. Dorothea is a serious, earnest young woman, while Celia is down to earth, sensible and far more worldly than her older sister. Dorothea marries the reverend Edward Causabon, a dry scholar much older than her, a man who has enough money to spend his life writing a book that he never seems able to finish. Her friends and family are horrified by her decision. But unlike them, Dorothea does not see him as old and humourless: to her, he is a man of learning and she would like nothing better than to dedicate her life to him.

Dr. Lydgate is an idealistic young doctor who has just moved to Middlemarch and wants to change the way medicine is practiced. This brings him into conflict with the doctors who live there, but he has a wealthy man on his side: Nicholas Bulstrode, a banker, who is willing to fund a new hospital that Lydgate will run. When Lydgate falls in love with the town’s beauty, Rosamund Vincy, and marries her, it changes his life and not for the better. Rosamund is spoiled, used to getting her own way, and she wants a good life and expensive things.

There are many more characters, including Causabon’s cousin, young Will Ladislaw, who falls in love with Dorothea (and she with him, but won’t admit it, even to herself); Fred Vincy, Rosamund’s brother, who keeps getting into scrapes; Camden Fairbrother, the vicar; Caleb Garth, an estate manager, a man with strong principles, and his daughter Mary—a strong woman who does not stand for any nonsense, even from Fred, whom she is in love with.

The two people at the centre, Dorothea and Lydgate, are both idealists who have rude awakenings, brought on by their unfortunate marriages.

Causabon, pompous and humourless, has no intention of involving Dorothea’s intellect in his work, but merely needs an assistant. She realizes that his magnum opus, The Key to All Mythologies, will never be finished, and even if it is, is not the great work she had imagined it to be. When he dies, his will stipulates that if Dorothea marries Will, she will lose her inheritance—thereby controlling her life even from beyond the grave.

Meanwhile, Rosamund, who has been rejecting the advances of the town beaus because she doesn’t think they are good enough for her, sets out to charm the new doctor. She has heard that Lydgate comes from a wealthy family of social standing, which she feels is her proper place. It is a marriage that disappoints them both. Lydgate had wanted a companion who would share his dreams and be willing to make sacrifices, while Rosamund had imagined herself as the wife of a rich man, entertaining the nobility.

Lydgate’s life is also complicated by his association with Bulstrode, a man who is not popular among the townsmen. Bulstrode, like the other characters in the book, has his own story. A man who preaches piety and holds himself to be better than others, has a past that eventually catches up with him.

What really stands out is George Eliot’s perception of human nature. Her characters are completely believable—they are nuanced and drawn from life, as it were. These are people you will recognize, people you have met. Eliot’s writing is a delight. Mr Brooke, for example, is a man “of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote. … Mr. Brooke’s conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money as possible in carrying them out”. Dorothea was “enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it”. Lydgate, before he found his calling, was a man who “could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable”.

Although Middlemarch was published in 1871-72, it still feels relevant. Through its characters, Eliot raises questions about the position of women, the medical profession, political reform, marriage and much more. It was an unusual book for its time, especially as a novel written by a woman. It is not light and airy with happy endings: instead, it is realistic. It does not necessarily end well for all its characters, and even when it does, the characters have to struggle to get there.

I first read Middlemarch in my late teens, lent to me by my boyfriend (and now husband). I have memories of sitting in the crawl space on the roof of my parents’ home in New Delhi, completely lost in the book. I reread it this year, decades later. I am no longer a dreamy teenager with very little experience of life, and my reactions to the characters has changed.

In Middlemarch, Eliot has woven a complex tapestry of life: it may be provincial, it may be set in England in the late 18^th century, but it is as timeless as it is universal.

Read my review of Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch, a bibliomemoir about her relationship with the novel.