Few novelists have ever attempted so broad a canvis as George Eliot in her masterpiece, Middlemarch. Portraying every level of social life in a provincial Midlands town called Middlemarch, she interweaves several intensely dramatic stories of love and death, betrayal and reconciliation, into one of the finest pictures of nineteenth-century England ever created Its acute psychological penetration also makes it exceptionally modern work, particularly in t romantic idealism of Dorothea Brooke, who oft resembles George Eliot herself, and in the disastros marriage and thwarted career of the you g reformist doctor, Lydgate. Virginia Woolf called t "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people"-and it is truly great literature that ranks among the best novels in the world.