George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) is widely considered the greatest realist novel of the 19th century. By the time she wrote it, Eliot (Marian Evans) was recognized as the greatest living English novelist. Middlemarch, her most ambitious novel to date, is both detailed and expansive, as its original subtitle, A Study of Provincial Life, suggests. This 800-page novel is a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes, and human strengths and follies in the fictional town of Middlemarch, c. 1830. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to a pedantic scholar, and Dr. Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods and unwillingness to compromise them, combined with an imprudent marriage to a spendthrift beauty, threaten to undermine his career. Their stories – and many others – are illuminated by Eliot’s formidable intelligence, imaginative sympathy, and acute powers of observation. Considered to be her masterpiece, Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “…one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

Reading comprises 200 pages per week. Classes combine brief lectures and PowerPoint presentations with discussion.