Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

Published in the early 1870s, this novel is set in a Midlands town on the eve of the 1832 Reform Bill. Dorothea Brooke marries the elderly scholar Casaubon and meets his cousin Will Ladislaw; the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate comes to the new fever hospital and marries the mayor's daughter Rosamond Vincy; the banker Bulstrode hides a past that Fred Vincy and the Garth family also brush against. Marriages, money, medical reform, and parish gossip intertwine. Vocation, disappointment, and the limits of reform occupy the centre. The book is a study of provincial life, not a London political novel.

Bound in pale green image blocked cloth. Frontispiece and 14 colour illustrations. Printed endpapers. Image blocked pale green cloth slipcase.