I don't know if women can have it all, a question that has spawned innumerable "think pieces," but they should surely have more than Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot's 1874 novel, ...

You couldn’t ask for a better guide through the intriguing life of novelist George Eliot than British-born Rebecca Mead, a staff writer at The New Yorker, who first read Eliot’s Middlemarch as an ...

George Eliot’s Middlemarch advertises itself as “A Study of Provincial Life,” but it has a great deal in it that might be of interest to Americans who just right now have some extra time on their ...

Helen Groth receives funding from the Australian Research Council. In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature. Middlemarch (1872) is a slow read and a deeply ...

The most scathing piece of literary criticism I’ve ever read is an essay, published in 1856, called “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” It begins like this: The author then describes the many literary ...

Ask some readers their favorite book, and they’ll rattle off a list of five or 10 but cannot narrow their dedication to one book or author. Ask others, and they’ll respond without hesitation with ...

WEREN'T THE BRITISH-those buying out the Buckingham Palace gift shop notwithstanding-supposed to be immune from this kind of silliness? It was one thing when 7 million people a night (20 percent of ...

I first walked down the streets of Middlemarch and met its vivid inhabitants when I was an earnest 20-year-old English major. For me, George Eliot’s classic novel was not an assigned reading in a ...

The idea that “shame works”—that stigmatizing behaviors and shaming the people who do them are necessary and honorable tools of public policy—is a recurring ...

At the beginning of “My Life in Middlemarch,’’ Rebecca Mead observes that there “are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.” In this blend of biography, memoir, ...