Described by some as the greatest novel in the English Language, Middlemarch paints a captivating portrait of provincial life at the time of the Industrial Revolution.The story centres on the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the pioneering Tertius Lydgate and their disastrous marriages to unsuitable partners. George Eliot also draws on a huge cast of other finely drawn characters to reflect facets of humankind, in all its fragility and complexity.As separate stories interweave and drama unfolds, Eliot uses these ordinary, 'unhistoric' lives to contemplate the colossal and the profound.