Middlemarch by George Eliot – A Panoramic Novel of Provincial Life, Free to Read and Hear

Name: Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot

By George Eliot · 1871

Idealism, marriage, medicine, money, and reform intersect across a provincial town in George Eliot’s panoramic social novel.

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Published in 1871, Middlemarch draws readers into the layered life of an English provincial town where idealism, marriage, medicine, money, and the push for reform are constantly in tension. George Eliot's narrator opens with a meditation on Saint Theresa, asking who among us has not paused over a life shaped by grand feeling and constrained circumstance. That question quietly governs the novel's many storylines and its large, carefully observed cast. Whether you are returning to Middlemarch or reading it for the first time, this free edition lets you read at your own pace, with no account required and no checkout process standing in the way.

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From the opening pages

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“Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa?”