Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

With new illustrations and a brilliant original introduction by New Yorker writer and author of My Life in Middlemarch Rebecca Mead, the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch presents George Eliot’s masterpiece of Victorian fiction in an appealing new light.

Long regarded as one of the greatest of the great English-language novels, Middlemarch by George Eliot has endured as the archetypal Victorian novel and an eternally resonant exploration of society and the individual. Centuries removed from the world of the landed gentry in 1830s England, the characters of Middlemarch remain as exquisitely drawn and deeply alive as any in literature: the pedantic, obsessive Reverend Casaubon, the idealistic Dr. Lydgate, and the spirited, striving Dorothea Brooke.

A novel of marriage, Eliot’s “study of Provincial Life” is also a strikingly fresh commentary on scientific and technological change, cultural and class divides, and the upheavals of a rural community experiencing global transformation. In her insightful introduction, Rebecca Mead, New Yorker writer and author of My Year in Middlemarch, explores Eliot’s “meliorism”―her belief that individuals can improve society in small, everyday ways. Dorothea’s successes and failures not only in love but as an ardent social reformer will resonate with all of us who look at the world today and ask, as Dorothea did in her time, “What could she do, what ought she to do?” With bold illustrations by artist Keren Katz, the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch is a thoroughly modern edition of one of the most important novels ever written.

Praise for Middlemarch

“Middlemarch is so careful to correct any habit to side with one person rather than another that the narrator even corrects herself.”
―John Mullan, author of What Matters in Jane Austen?

“A novel without weaknesses, it renews itself for every generation.”
―Martin Amis, author of Inside Story

“Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
―Virginia Woolf

“Middlemarch shows us the contours and indeed the very language of the characters’ inner lives.”
―Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

George Eliot was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, an English Victorian author whose major works include The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.

Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She has profiled many subjects, among them Lin-Manuel Miranda, Margaret Atwood, Nico Muhly, Slavoj Žižek, and Mary Beard. She has also written more than two hundred Talk of the Town stories and is a frequent contributor to Cultural Comment on newyorker.com. She is the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding and My Life in Middlemarch. She lives in London.

Keren Katz is a cartoonist, writer, and the non-fictitious half of The Katz Sisters Duo. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts’s MFA Illustration Program and Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. She is the author of two graphic novels The Academic Hour and The Backstage of a Dishwashing Webshow and was nominated for the SPX Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist. Her work has been published in anthologies by Fantagraphics, Smoke Signal, Locust Moon, Rough House, Ink Brick, Retrofit Comics, The Brooklyn Rail, Kuš! (nominated for the SPX Ignatz Award for Outstanding Mini Comic), Carrier Pigeon and Seven Stories Press.