Middlemarch Harper Perennial Deluxe Editions

George Eliot’s beloved classic novel—hailed by Virginia Woolf as “masterful”—follows the life, loves, foibles, and politics of the residents of a fictional English town set amid the social unrest of the Industrial Revolution. This Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition includes an introduction by award-winning author Francine Prose. Dorothea Brooke married Edward Casaubon—a clergyman and scholar some years her senior—naively hoping their union would be a true meeting of the minds. Trapped in a lonely marriage to a tyrannical man, she finds companionship with Edward’s cousin, but her overtures risk her spotless reputation and jeopardize her future. Young doctor Tertius Lydgate comes to Middlemarch full of progressive ideas, eager to volunteer his skill at the local hospital. Through his connections there he meets the mayor’s beautiful daughter, Rosamond Vincy, and marries her, only to face financial ruin at the hands of her materialism and overwhelming vanity. Rosamond’s brother, Fred, is destined for the Church to improve his family’s class standing, but his childhood sweetheart, Mary Garth, refuses to marry him unless he pursues a more suitable career. Forced by fate into uncertain financial circumstances, Fred must question his choices and desires if he hopes to earn Mary’s respect. God-fearing and esteemed, Nicholas Bulstrode is a good man and trustworthy banker—or so it appears until an old enemy comes to town, intent on revealing Bulstrode’s shady past dealings. Terrified of being exposed as a hypocrite, he takes matters into his own hands, each desperate act spiraling him further into disgrace and corruption. A masterwork of fiction, Middlemarch traces these four lives in a plot that illuminates the social fabric of mid-nineteenth-century England. Looming above the landscape of Victorian literature, Eliot’s beloved novel explores the perennial struggle between individual and society, integrity and temptation, and is as timely today as when it was first published.

George Eliot's beloved masterpiece in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a foreword by Rebecca Mead, author of the bestselling memoir My Life in Middlemarch A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against this backdrop, the quiet drama of ordinary lives is played out by the novel's complexly portrayed characters--until the arrival of two outsiders further disrupts the town's equilibrium. Every bit as powerful and perceptive in our time as it was in the Victorian era, Middlemarch displays George Eliot's clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge. In this elegant Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, Rebecca Mead introduces the novel that shaped her life and reflects on its joys and its timeless relevance. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Middlemarch follows the life of Dorothea Brooke; the career of Tertius Lydgate; the courtship of Mary Garth by Fred Vincy; and the disgrace of Bulstrode. Significant themes include the status of women, idealism, and education.

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in a coastal town of England when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs and then marriage and family, Rebecca Mead reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads the reader into the life that her favorite book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that perfectly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's novel and brings them into the world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an uncanny portrait of the ways in which Mead's life echoes that of the author herself, My Life in Middlemarch is a book for who wonders about the power of literature to shape our lives.

Subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, George Eliot's novel Middlemarch is a chronicle of the titularnineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of political and socialchange. Eliot explores the upheaval and transformation brought about bythese changes through their impact on the lives of a richly varied cast ofcharacters that includes the pious young Dorothea Brooke, her suitor theReverend Edward Casaubon, the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate, and themysterious schemer John Raffles.

In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance; but in his nieceDorothea it glowed alike through faults and virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of heruncle's talk or his way of "letting things be" on his estate, and making her long all the more for thetime when she would be of age and have some command of money for generous schemes. She wasregarded as an heiress; for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents, but if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr. Brooke's estate, presumably worthabout three thousand a-year-a rental which seemed wealth to provincial families, still discussingMr. Peel's late conduct on the Catholic question, innocent of future gold-fields, and of that gorgeousplutocracy which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life

Vast and crowded, rich in irony and suspense, Middlemarch is richer still in character, with two of the era's most enduring characters, Dorothea Brooke, trapped in a loveless marriage, and Lydgate.

Against a background of English moors in the eighteenth century, the lives of two families become intertwined through marriage, passion, and the dominating force of a man called Heathcliff.

The story of the Phantom of the Opera, a half-crazed musician hiding in the labyrinth of the famous Paris Opera House and creating a number of strange and mysterious events to further the career of a beautiful young singer, is today regarded as one of the most famous of all horror stories: widely mentioned in the same breath as Frankenstein and Dracula. Yet the fame of this novel is based almost entirely on the various film versions, while the original book has been largely ignored and is rarely in print. An Accelerated Reader® Title

In the vein of Downton Abbey, Jane Austen's beloved but unfinished masterpiece-often considered her most modern and exciting novel-gets a spectacular second act in this tie-in to a major new limited television series. Written only months before Austen's death in 1817, Sanditon tells the story of the joyously impulsive, spirited and unconventional Charlotte Heywood and her spiky relationship with the humorous, charming (and slightly wild!) Sidney Parker. When a chance accident transports her from her rural hometown of Willingden to the would-be coastal resort of the eponymous title, it exposes Charlotte to the intrigues and dalliances of a seaside town on the make, and the characters whose fortunes depend on its commercial success. The twists and turns of the plot, which takes viewers from the West Indies to the rotting alleys of London, exposes the hidden agendas of each character and sees Charlotte discover herself... and ultimately find love.

“Prose’s book is a stunning achievement. . . . Now Anne Frank stands before us. . . a figure who will live not only in history but also in the literature she aspired to create.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune In June, 1942, Anne Frank received a diary for her thirteenth birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. For two years, she described life in hiding in vivid, unforgettable detail and grappled with the unfolding events of World War II. Before the attic was raided in August, 1944, Anne Frank furiously revised and edited her work, crafting a piece of literature that she hoped would be read by the public after the war. And read it has been. In Anne Frank, bestselling author Francine Prose deftly parses the artistry, ambition, and enduring influence of Anne Frank’s beloved classic, The Diary of a Young Girl. She investigates the diary’s unique afterlife: the obstacles and criticism Otto Frank faced in publishing his daughter’s words; the controversy surrounding the diary’s Broadway and film adaptations, and the social mores of the 1950s that reduced it to a tale of adolescent angst and love; the conspiracy theories that have cried fraud, and the scientific analysis that proved them wrong. Finally, having assigned the book to her own students, Prose considers the rewards and challenges of teaching one of the world’s most read, and banned, books. How has the life and death of one girl become emblematic of the lives and deaths of so many, and why do her words continue to inspire? Approved by both the Anne Frank House Foundation in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, run by the Frank family, Anne Frank unravels the fascinating story of a memoir that has become one of the most compelling, intimate, and important documents of modern history.

This collection contains every essay written in George Eliot's career, including some rare works like The Influence of Rationalism.

A richly imagined and stunningly inventive literary masterpiece of love, art, and betrayal, exploring the genesis of evil, the unforeseen consequences of love, and the ultimate unreliability of storytelling itself. Paris in the 1920s shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom. It is a place of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club’s loyal denizens, including the rising Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, the socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol; and the caustic American writer Lionel Maine. As the years pass, their fortunes—and the world itself—evolve. Lou falls desperately in love and finds success as a race car driver. Gabor builds his reputation with startlingly vivid and imaginative photographs, including a haunting portrait of Lou and her lover, which will resonate through all their lives. As the exuberant twenties give way to darker times, Lou experiences another metamorphosis—sparked by tumultuous events—that will warp her earnest desire for love and approval into something far more.