REVIEWS

“Nadia May makes [Middlemarch] come alive. She is in wonderful form as she slides from character to character, giving them their distinctiveness through intonation and pacing. May’s voice is that of the genteel British woman, and it’s the perfect thing for Eliot.”—Library Journal

“One of the most profound, wise, and absorbing of English novels…above all, truthful and forgiving about human behavior.”—Hermione Lee

“No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative….No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully.”—V.S. Pritchett

GEORGE ELIOT, the pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans (1819–1880), was an English Victorian novelist of the first rank. An assistant editor for the Westminster Review from 1851 to 1854, she wrote her first fiction in 1857 and her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, in 1859. Her writing was chiefly preoccupied with moral problems, especially the moral development of her characters.