Middlemarch is a moving story of men and women longing to do the right thing, but making bad decisions. Among them is Dorothea Brooke, who wants to improve the world but finds her idealism crushed by her unhappy marriage to the aged scholar Casaubon, and Dr Lydgate, whose shallow, spendthrift wife threatens his dreams of medical progress.

Described by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people', Middlemarch's panoramic sweep ranges over the whole of human existence — art, faith, science, politics and love — yet at its heart are real, flawed people searching for contentment.