“We must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose,” Virginia Woolf wrote of George Eliot, in 1919, appraising the author’s work on the centenary of her birth.

Helen Groth receives funding from the Australian Research Council. In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature. Middlemarch (1872) is a slow read and a deeply ...