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A highly emotional yet exciting book<\/a> is one that you may not have read but it has topped the list of BBC<\/a>\u2019s 100 greatest British novels<\/a>. Published in eight parts from 1871 to 1872, Middlemarch is considered to be George Eliot\u2019s masterpiece. George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans who used a male pseudonym to ensure her works were taken seriously in an era when female authors were usually associated with romantic novels.<\/p>\n Middlemarch is a realist work<\/a> which is a study of class of society, from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, farmers, and labourers. One reviewer on Goodreads said: \u201cThe end will leave you teetering on the brink, revisiting all of your personal, deep-seated assumptions about people, what is a successful life, what is a good marriage, how you measure goodness and your impact on others’ lives.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n George Eliot\u2019s novel<\/a> is an evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community.<\/p>\n The novel follows Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past.<\/p>\n As their stories<\/a> interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as \u201cone of the few English novels written for grown-up people\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The novel<\/a> has been adapted to the screen with one of the most popular adaptations<\/a> being the 1994 TV mini-series.<\/p>\n Starring Douglas Hodge, Juliet Aubrey and Trevyn McDowell, the series received a 7.5 out of 10 rating on IMDb.<\/p>\n One reviewer posted: \u201cOf all of George Eliot’s novels<\/a>, all of which are at least worth reading, Middlemarch gets my vote for personal favourite.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s an incredibly rich story in detail and emotion and the characters are human and complex, though some like Casaubon are purposefully not very likable.<\/p>\n