Recommendations
Books Like Middlemarch
Best books to read after Middlemarch by George Eliot
George Eliot's Middlemarch is widely considered the greatest English novel — a sweeping Victorian study of provincial life, marriage, and moral ambition. These recommendations extend the experience through Eliot's other novels and through ambitious Victorian fiction about women's lives.
- 1Buy
The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
Eliot's most autobiographical novel, about Maggie Tulliver's childhood and young womanhood in a provincial English town — a more passionate and personal book than Middlemarch, with a tragic ending that shocked Eliot's first readers.
- 2Buy
Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
Eliot's final novel, divided between the story of the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth's disastrous marriage and the story of Daniel Deronda's discovery of his Jewish identity. The most ambitious and formally experimental of Eliot's novels.
- 3Buy
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
The foundational Victorian novel of female interiority and independence — Jane's moral strength, her refusal to compromise, and her eventual happiness make her the most beloved of Victorian heroines and the closest to Dorothea Brooke in spirit.
- 4Buy
North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's novel about Margaret Hale, who moves from rural Hampshire to the industrial North and finds herself between two worlds — a Victorian novel about class, gender, and social change that shares Middlemarch's serious interest in the social fabric.
- 5Buy
Wives and Daughters
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's final, unfinished novel — Molly Gibson's navigation of her father's remarriage and the social world of a small English town. The most Middlemarch-like of Gaskell's novels in its warmth, its social texture, and its interest in women's choices.
- 6Buy
The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's masterpiece about Isabel Archer, an American heiress in Europe who values her independence above everything and makes a disastrous marriage — the American answer to Middlemarch's preoccupation with female autonomy and its constraints.
- 7Buy
Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's novel about Bathsheba Everdene, a beautiful and independent farmer who manages her own land and chooses among three very different suitors — the most affirmative of Hardy's novels about women and the closest in feeling to Middlemarch.
- 8Buy
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's satirical novel about Becky Sharp's ruthless social ascent — the Victorian novel that most thoroughly examines the social system from which Dorothea Brooke is trying to escape, from the perspective of someone entirely without Dorothea's scruples.
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