Middlemarch, in full, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, novel of epic proportions-in length and scope-by George Eliot. SUMMARY; 'One of the few English novels written for grown-up people' was how novelist Virginia Woolf described this stunning, momentous and moving novel. Set in the early 1830s, Middlemarch is a small fictional village undergoing large social change. There is rapid industrialization and increased social mobility, and no single religious faith ties the community together. In great detail is every class of Middlemarch society examined-from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, farmers, and labourers-though the focus of the novel is on the thwarted idealism of its two principal characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, both of whom marry disastrously. It is here where Eliot broke with convention. Instead of ending her work with the inevitable marriage and happy ending, as women writers of romance fiction were then expected to do, Eliot chose instead to detail the realities of marriage, even unhappy couplings. Male critics, as a result, castigated her bold and daring narrative as too gloomy for a "woman writer." In the story, Dorothea is an earnest, intelligent woman and a budding social reformer who makes a serious error in judgment when she chooses to marry Edward Casaubon, a scholarly man many years her senior. Lydgate is a young doctor in Middlemarch who becomes involved with and marries the unsuitable Rosamond Vincy. Dorothea discovers her husband to be a pompous fraud and an incompatible and repressive partner. Lydgate finds himself on the brink of financial ruin and personal disgrace because of his ill-considered choice of a wife. Power struggles in both marriages further doom the relationships. The plot of the novel is a long and involved working out of these two misguided decisions. In addition to creating a thoroughgoing and rich portrait of the life of a small early 19th-century town, Eliot produced an essentially modern novel, with penetrating psychological insights and moral ambiguity. In the end, Dorothea, with her wealth of dreams and obvious intelligence, is pitied by some for having become "only" a mother and a wife, hinting that it was the social conditions of the day that forced women like Dorothea to defer to men and their careers, sublimate their larger ambitions, and prevent them from being all that they could be. This is but one of the many themes long teased out and debated from this complex but masterful web of fiction.