Middlemarch (Penguin Classics)
by George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton
ISBN 13: 978-0141439549
Book description

George Eliot's Victorian masterpiece: a magnificent portrait of a provincial town and its inhabitants George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life , explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of modern changes. The proposed Reform Bill promises political change; the building of railroads alters both the physical and cultural landscape; new scientific approaches to medicine incite public division; and scandal lurks behind respectability. The quiet drama of ordinary lives and flawed choices are played out in the complexly portrayed central characters of the novel—the idealistic Dorothea Brooke; the ambitious Dr. Lydgate; the spendthrift Fred Vincy; and the steadfast Mary Garth. The appearance of two outsiders further disrupts the town’s equilibrium—Will Ladislaw, the spirited nephew of Dorothea’s husband, the Rev. Edward Casaubon, and the sinister John Raffles, who threatens to expose the hidden past of one of the town’s elite. Middlemarch displays George Eliot’s clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge. This Penguin Classics edition uses the second edition of 1874 and features an introduction and notes by Eliot-biographer Rosemary Ashton. In her introduction, Ashton discusses themes of social change in Middlemarch , and examines the novel as an imaginative embodiment of Eliot's humanist beliefs. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.


Recommended on 4 episodes:

Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
On the first day of President Trump’s second term, he signed a record 26 executive orders. Some of them were really big. Others feel more likely messaging memos. And still others are bound to be held up in the courts. So what does it all amount to? What exactly in America has changed? In a former life, I co-hosted a podcast called “The Weeds” with other policy wonks at Vox, including Dara Lind and Matthew Yglesias. We’ve since gone our separate ways; Lind is currently a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, and Yglesias is the author of the Substack newsletter Slow Boring. But since this was such a big policy week, I wanted to get some of the band back together. In this conversation, we discuss how much Trump’s immigration orders will actually change our immigration system; whether any of Trump’s orders address Americans’ concerns over prices; how serious Trump actually is about tariffs; and more.
Matthew Yglesias , Dara Lind Jan. 25, 2025 6 books recommended
View

This Conversation About the 'Reading Mind' Is a Gift
Every day, we consume a mind-boggling amount of information. We scan online news articles, sift through text messages and emails, scroll through our social-media feeds — and that’s usually before we even get out of bed in the morning. In 2009, a team of researchers found that the average American consumed about 34 gigabytes of information a day. Undoubtedly, that number would be even higher today. But what are we actually getting from this huge influx of information? How is it affecting our memories, our attention spans, our ability to think? What might this mean for today’s children, and future generations? And what does it take to read — and think — deeply in a world so flooded with constant input? Maryanne Wolf is a researcher and scholar at U.C.L.A.’s School of Education and Information Studies. Her books “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” and “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World” explore the relationship between the process of reading and the neuroscience of the brain. And, in Wolfe’s view, our era of information overload represents a historical inflection point where our ability to read — truly, deeply read, not just scan or scroll — hangs in the balance. We discuss why reading is a fundamentally “unnatural” act, how scanning and scrolling differ from “deep reading,” why it’s not accurate to say that “reading” is just one thing, how our brains process information differently when we’re reading on a Kindle or a laptop as opposed to a physical book, how exposure to such an abundance of information is rewiring our brains and reshaping our society, how to rediscover the lost art of reading books deeply, what Wolf recommends to those of us who struggle against digital distractions, what parents can do to to protect their children’s attention, how Wolf’s theory of a “biliterate brain” may save our species’ ability to deeply process language and information and more.
Maryanne Wolf Nov. 22, 2022 4 books recommended
View


by @zachbellay