A young woman marries an elderly scholar because she believes his work will give her life purpose, and discovers instead a labyrinth of dead passages and airless rooms. George Eliot published this novel in 1871, and it remains the fullest portrait of a community in English fiction, weaving idealists and hypocrites, doctors and bankers in a provincial town on the eve of the Reform Bill. Dorothea's hunger for significance, Lydgate's ambition, Bulstrode's buried sin: each illuminates the others with a moral intelligence that never condescends. Eliot's narrator sees everything and forgives almost everything, and the result is a novel that feels less written than lived. It teaches that the growing good of the world depends on unhistoric acts.