Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871
Virginia Woolf called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." A whole provincial town rendered with moral intelligence no other Victorian novelist matched. George Eliot proved what the novel could do when it took the interior life of women seriously. The standard-bearer for realist fiction in English.
The case against
Eight hundred pages of provincial life, and the narrator pauses every few of them to tell you what to think about it. Eliot's wisdom is real but ungoverned; she trusts no scene to speak for itself. And Will Ladislaw, the man Dorothea's whole arc bends toward, is the thinnest character in the book.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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