Middlemarch

Writing at the very moment when the foundations of Western thought were being challenged and undermined, George Eliot fashions in Middlemarch a concept of life and society free of the past's dogma yet able to confront the scepticism that was taking over the age.

David Carroll is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, edited the Clarendon edition of Middlemarch (1986). As well as publishing many articles on George Eliot's fiction, he has written Chinua Achebe (1980) and other essays on African literature. He is joint General Editor of the Longman Literature in English Series. David Russell is Associate Professor of English and Tutorial Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2017).