Middlemarch for iOS Install: A Novel of Social and Political Reform

For most of the 19th-century, novels were published in one of two ways – either broken into installments of one or two chapters to be printed in a magazine (like Charles Dickens's novels), or published in 3-volume hardbacks (called triple deckers). The length of the novel actually forced George Eliot's agent (and long-time lover), George Henry Lewes, to invent a new way to publish it. That's a lot of pages, but then, Eliot had a lot to say.

And we do mean huge: the edition we're using (the 1994 Penguin edition, edited by Rosemary Ashton) is 838 pages long. It is, in other words, a huge and wide-ranging novel. But it's also a novel about love and marriage. If we had to sum up Middlemarch in just a few words, we might say that it's a novel about social and political reform.

So now you know, and can laugh up your sleeve at folks who say, 'Oh, you're reading Middlemarch by George Eliot? I just loooove his novels.' Her real name was Marian (or Mary Ann – she spelled it both ways) Evans. Don't let the name fool you – it was just a pen name, because she didn't think that female novelists were taken seriously as artists.

And before we go any further, we should let you know that Eliot was a woman. George Eliot was an English novelist writing in the mid-19th century.

Middlemarch for ios instal