The Guardian view on Middlemarch: the greatest novel in the English language | Editorial

George Eliot’s masterpiece of provincial life still has much to teach us about sympathy and tolerance Virgina Woolf declared Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Henry James said that some of its scenes were the most intelligent in English fiction. Even Martin Amis, over 100 years later, called it “a novel without weaknesses”. Now this 900-page portrait of 19th-century provincial life has been voted the best novel of all time in a Guardian poll of writers, ...

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