Dorothea is on a quest to find heroism in ordinary people, an enthralling journey which encompasses both highs and lows.

Praised by Virginia Woolf as one of the only novels 'written for grown-up people', Middlemarch is a highly accomplished story, whose characters are involving and intreguing. Dorothea's story interlinks powerfully and tantalisingly with that of Lydgate's, a doctor, who joins her for a some of her journey towards making sense of her role in the world, both as a woman and as an idealist.