A long English novel by George Eliot, published in parts in 1871-72. 'George Eliot' was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, a woman who used a man's name so that her books would be taken seriously — a useful thing to know, because students often say 'he'. The book is set in an invented country town in the middle of England, also called Middlemarch, in the years around 1830, when England was arguing about who should be allowed to vote and railways were just arriving. It follows many townspeople at once, mainly Dorothea, a serious young woman who marries a cold old scholar hoping to help him with great work that turns out to be worthless, and Lydgate, a young doctor with new ideas who is slowly worn down by money troubles and small-town opinion. Nothing dramatic happens; the power of the book is in how exactly it shows ordinary people's hopes shrinking. Many writers and critics call it the greatest novel in English — Virginia Woolf famously said it was one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. In English, the title is often used as a shorthand for the big serious Victorian novel, and 'Middlemarch' can also be used loosely for a narrow provincial town where everyone watches everyone. It is a proper noun, so always a capital M, and no 'the' before it.

《米德爾馬契》，喬治·艾略特（本名 Mary Ann Evans，女性作家用男性筆名）1871-72 年的長篇小說；常被認為是英國文學最偉大的小說之一