Read by Harriet Walter, who has an extremely attractive voice.
From the back cover:
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the first Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Tertius Lydate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century. Henry James described Middlemarch as a 'treasure-house of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.'
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the first Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Tertius Lydate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century. Henry James described Middlemarch as a 'treasure-house of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.'
I had a hard time with all the description in this one. The main story line was good, but I just wanted Elliot to get to the point!
Takes time to get into; but well worth it!
NORTON CRITICAL EDITION
This is the riverside edition published by houghton mifflin and edited by Gordon Haight.
Critic V S Pritchett writes, "I cannot see any novel of the nineteenth century that surpasses Middlemarch in range or construction...I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot."