The Book 
George Eliot wrote Middlemarch towards the end of her career, and it is the best known and most highly regarded of her novels. It was first published in serial form in 1871-1872. The novel weaves together several different strands, following the fortunes of characters in and around the provincial English town of Middlemarch at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill and the coming of the railways. The two main threads bring together what Eliot had originally planned as two separate novels - Middlemarch, the story of Dr Lydgate, and Miss Brooke, the story of Dorothea. Eliot draws a complex web of relationships between the various characters, so that their diverse experiences and viewpoints come together to form a satisfying whole.