The most ambitious narrative of nineteenth-century realism, Middlemarch tells the story of an entire town in the years leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, a time when modern methods were starting to challenge old orthodoxies. Eliot`s sophisticated and acute characterization gives rich expression to every nuance of feeling, and vividly brings to life the town`s inhabitants - including the young idealist Dorothea Brooke, the dry scholar Casaubon, the young, passionate reformist doctor Lydgate, the flighty young beauty Rosamond and the old, secretive banker Bulstrode - as they move in counterpoint to each other. Art, religion, politics, society, science, human relationships in all their complexity, nothing is left unexamined under the narrator`s microscope. One of the greatest novels written in the English language, Middlemarch is a literary landmark in its groundbreaking approach, as well as a priceless document of its age.