MIDDLEMARCH BY GEORGE ELIOT

    Few novelists have ever attempted so broad a canvas as george Eliot in her masterpiese,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 credated.Its acute psychological penetration makes it also and exceptionally modern work,particularly in the romantic idealism of Dorothea Brooke,who often resembles George Eliot hersefl,and in the disastrous marriage and thwarted career of the young reformist doctor,Lyagate.Virginial Woolf called it"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.

作者简介：
Mary Ann Evans was born on November 22,1819,at Chilvers Coton,Warwickshire,England,the last child of an estater agent.During her Girlhood and early youth she was piously Evangelical,but her friendship with religious freethinkers in Coventry in the early 1840s reinforced her own growing doubts and led to a break with orthodox religion.She then spent two years translating D.F.Strauss's The Life of Jesus Critically Examined(1846),a work that had a profound effect on English rationalism.

Mary Ann Evans was born on November 22, 1819, at Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England, the last child of an estate agent. During her girlhood, she went through a phase of evangelical piety, but her strong interest in philosophy and her friendship with religious freethinkers led to a break with orthodox religion. When one of these friends married in 1843, Mary Ann took over from his wife the task of translating D.F. Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846), a work that had deep effect on English rationalism. After her father’s death she settled in London and from 1851 to 1854 she served as a writer and editor of the Westminster Review, the organ of the Radical party. In London she met she met George Henry Lewes, a journalist and advanced thinker. Lewes was separated from his wife, who had had two sons by another man, but had been unable to obtain a divorce. In a step daring for Victorian times, Mary Ann Evans began living openly with Lewes in 1854, in a union they both considered as sacred as a legal marriage and one that lasted until his death in 1878.

With Lewes’s encouragement, Mary Ann Evans wrote her first fictional work, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857; it was followed by two more stories published under the pseudonym George Elliot–“George” because it was Lewes’s name and “Eliot” because, she said, it was good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” At the age of thirty-nine she used her memories of Warwickshire to write her first long novel, Adam Bede (1859), a book that established her as the foremost woman novelist in her day. Then came The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). Her masterpiece and one of the greatest English novels, Middlemarch, was published in 1871-72. Her last work was Daniel Deronda (1876). After Lewes’s death George Eliot married John Walter Cross. He was forty; she was sixty-one. Before her death on December 22, 1880, she had been recognized by her contemporaries as the greatest living writer of English fiction.

Introduction by Margaret Drablle
A Note on the Text
Prelude
Book One-MISS BROOKE
Book Two-OLD AND YOUNG
Book Three-WAITING FOR DEATH
Book Four-THREE LOVE PROBLEMS
Book Five-THE DEAD HAND
Book Six-THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE
Book Seven-TWO TEMPTATIONS
Book Eight-SUNSET AND SUNRISE
Finale
Afterword by Jerome Beaty
Notes Selected Bibliography