Period novel clinches the top spot in greatest 100 novels of all time | Books | Entertainment
To create this list, the Guardian polled more than 170 authors, critics and academics around the world to rank their all-time top 10 novels published in English. Titles were scored according to how often they were voted for, and then a weighting was applied based on individual rankings to produce the overall list.
The book’s synopsis reads: “George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.
Upon its initial release, the book received mixed reviews, but over the past century, the book has become known as a classic and well-loved book.
Some of these authors included Stephen King, Bernadine Evaristo, Richard Osman, Elizabeth Day, Colm Tóibin, Elif Shafak, Ian Rankin, Kit de Waal and Salman Rushdie.
But at number one was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, released in 1871.
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, appeared in eight instalments (volumes) throughout 1871 and 1872. The book itself is set in Middlemarch, a fictional English Midlands town, between 1829 and 1832. The book’s themes follow distinct, intersecting stories with many characters, the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism, self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform, and education. It has also been praised for its comic elements, as well as detailing several significant historical events in a realist mode: the Reform Act of 1832, early railways, and the accession of King William IV.
The book’s synopsis reads: “George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.
Upon its initial release, the book received mixed reviews, but over the past century, the book has become known as a classic and well-loved book.
