Reading Order
Middlemarch Reading Order
George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–1872) is a complete standalone novel, serialized in eight installments. It follows four interconnected stories in the fictional English midlands town of Middlemarch: the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and her disastrous marriage to the elderly scholar Edward Casaubon; the young doctor Tertius Lydgate and his marriage to the beautiful and calculating Rosamond Vincy; the political career of Nicholas Bulstrode; and the romance between Fred Vincy and Mary Garth. Widely considered the greatest English novel.
Where to start
Middlemarch
Complete Middlemarch Book List
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Middlemarch
George Eliot·1871·Standalone — Dorothea Brooke's idealism and her disastrous first marriage; Lydgate's provincial medical career and his equally disastrous marriage; a portrait of a community across two years in the 1830s; very long, very rich, and almost universally considered the greatest English novel - Buy
Daniel Deronda
OptionalGeorge Eliot·1876·Eliot's final novel — Gwendolen Harleth's terrible marriage and Daniel Deronda's discovery of his Jewish identity; less focused than Middlemarch but the essential companion in her work, and the novel in which she takes the greatest formal risks - Buy
The Mill on the Floss
OptionalGeorge Eliot·1860·Eliot's most autobiographical novel — Maggie Tulliver growing up on the River Floss in the English midlands; shorter and more intimate than Middlemarch, and a good introduction to Eliot for readers who find Middlemarch's length daunting
Middlemarch — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Middlemarch a standalone?
Yes — Middlemarch is entirely self-contained and has no sequel. George Eliot's other novels — Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Daniel Deronda (1876) — are all independent works set in the same English midlands world but not connected in plot or character.
Is Middlemarch too long?
Middlemarch is very long — approximately 800 pages — but is not slow in the way that some Victorian novels can be. George Eliot's narrator is extremely engaging, and the novel's multiple plots move with considerable momentum. Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.' Most readers who attempt it find it absorbing by the end of the first hundred pages.
What is Middlemarch about?
Middlemarch is about a community in the English midlands town of the same name across two years in the early 1830s, structured around four main storylines. Dorothea Brooke is an intelligent and idealistic young woman who marries the elderly scholar Edward Casaubon in the hope of contributing to his great work, and discovers that he is both narrower and more jealous than she had imagined. Tertius Lydgate is a young doctor with genuine medical ambitions who marries the beautiful Rosamond Vincy and finds his career destroyed by debt. The novel asks what happens to idealism in ordinary life — what we do when the world refuses to cooperate with our larger intentions.
What did Virginia Woolf say about Middlemarch?
Virginia Woolf, in a 1919 centenary essay on George Eliot, called Middlemarch 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people' — a remark meant to distinguish it from the sensation novels and domestic comedies that constituted most Victorian fiction. Woolf considered Eliot the equal of Tolstoy in her moral seriousness and her psychological insight, and regarded Middlemarch as the supreme achievement of Victorian fiction.
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