Middlemarch James Allen until her carefully constructed Elsie-verse

until her carefully constructed Elsie-verse comes crashing down

Rachel Price reappears

• Readers who love to highlight just the right line

Piper doesn’t want any distractions

Middlemarch James Allen until her carefully constructed Elsie-verse"People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are" George Eliots most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with