This Penguin Classic is performed by Juliet Aubrey, who won the BAFTA for Best Actress for her role as Dorothea in the BBC serial Middlemarch. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Rosemary Ashton.

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 fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past.

Public Domain (P)2019 Penguin Audio

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Product details

Listening Length	36 hours and 52 minutes
Author	George Eliot
Narrator	Juliet Aubrey
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com.au Release Date	27 September 2019
Publisher	Penguin Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B07VXBQMY5
Best Sellers Rank	15,790 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) 482 in Classic Literature 1,227 in Classic Literature & Fiction

Customer reviews

5 star		63%
4 star		17%
3 star		9%
2 star		4%
1 star		7%

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Gossipy neighbours and beautiful writing

Reviewed in Australia on 20 July 2017

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This is 'Days of Our Lives' in 1800's England as two characters make bad marriage choices. It’s also about the good citizens of Middlemarch, where the favourite activity is speculating about the neighbors. But you need to be ready for the wordiness of 1800's novelists to enjoy this wonderful book.

Idealistic Dorothea marries an older man for his great mind, despite the warnings of a pragmatic sister. She soon finds her husband’s greatness does not extend to daily life where he is petty and self-absorbed. Like Dorothea, local doctor Tertius also has a noble heart, but falls in love with a shallow woman. I have always wished nice Tertius and Dorothea could get together but that is not where the story goes.

I like that idealism causes so much trouble. Even today this is unexpected...we expect noble people to be rewarded. There are no easy HEAs in Middlemarch, but it's not totally miserable either. One of the leads lucks out. And I love the gossipy town and all the local characters. Best of all is George Eliot's clever writing...like the observations of an invisible local. On every page there are quotable comments. And her writing style is so lyrical - to me it reads like a poem.

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Amazon Customer

Characters drew me in

Reviewed in Australia on 3 January 2018

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I enjoyed finding out about the characters in Middlemarch, their flaws and concerns. I found myself caring about what happened to them. It was also a fascinating journey of time and place. It was at times a slow journey around the daily rituals of a community. A very detailed account of people and their differences.

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Jennifer Taylor

Waste of money

Reviewed in Australia on 6 March 2021

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This is an unreadable copy. It reads like a poor translation. I thought I was buying a classic at a cheap price but it is so poorly written that it is incomprehensible - a Victorian novel that uses the word 'guy' instead of 'man' ? Not worth one star but I was unable to submit less.

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Eric A. Foster

Lovely prose style of a ill timed romance in Victorian ...

Reviewed in Australia on 8 September 2017

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Lovely prose style of a ill timed romance in Victorian England. I read it more for its elegant writing style than for the storyline which is very much of its time.

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Amazon Customer

to many boring people, not enough story

Reviewed in Australia on 5 May 2017

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To long, to many words, to many boring people,not enough story, to many pages with nothing interesting on them!

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Sam Pluck

Long but great characters

Reviewed in Australia on 18 July 2016

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Really worthwhile read getting into the human psyche well and immersing you with the characters. There is a thoroughly enjoyable and somewhat complex plot which I enjoyed.

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Brenda.K

One Star

Reviewed in Australia on 31 May 2015

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I didn't like it. The auld English style of writing was hard to read and I found it boring.

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Chris from Oz

Narrator let this down. Some may like it though.

Reviewed in Australia on 23 June 2019

Like Juliet Stevenson as an actress but found it very hard to differentiate between different characters she was portraying, so this made listening hard.

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Top reviews from other countries

edward guy

Travesty

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 August 2019

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Middlemarch is for me a much loved novel to which I return time and time again.This version was at times incoherent and inappropriate terms such as guys and I think mom were used. I gave up unable to read or enjoy. Why these weird changes?

31 people found this helpful

chris lewis

There is some gremlin/hacker replacing words with close synonyms on my Kindle edition

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 January 2020

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I am sure that George Eliot did not use the expressions 'c programming language' and 'e book' when writing in the 1850s. But they occur often in my Kindle edition of Middlemarch. No logical explanation. Also the word 'work' is usually replaced by 'paintings' and the word 'country' by u.s.a. Again no logical reason. A lady was also wearing a dress that was described as 'homosexual': presumably Eliot wrote gay. Who changed the words and why. Is this something that is happening a lot or am I the first to be so hacked.

It is a bit more logical when 'about' is mostly replaced by 'approximately'. They can meant the same but do not always: eg ' we talk approximately Fred' . Or 'dress' always by 'get dressed' : eg 'she wore a blue get dressed.' Or 'see' by 'peer' or 'my dear' by my pricey'. Eliot may have written these. I cannot check as I am abroad at the moment.
It's like reading a book in French with lots of faux amis. But this Kindle edition has I would guess about 2 or 3 such changes every page. Other examples are in the quotations at the top of each Chapter: Eliot uses them to illustrate what is happening. But the quotations from both Blake's Songs of Innocence and from Shakespeare's Sonnet 93 are changed by including close synonyms but the metre is sometimes lost.

Do you know all about this which is why the Kindle edition is so cheap.

20 people found this helpful

Antenna

A masterpiece that stands the test of time and repays the time needed to read it.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 September 2017

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How can a book written a century-and-a-half ago still exert such a powerful addiction over modern readers who imagine themselves to be free from the conventions concerning class, race, gender and honour which so shackled C19 society? A remarkably perceptive and articulate woman who wrote as “George Eliot” to ensure she was not merely published but taken seriously at the time, Mary Ann Evans was able to enter into the minds of her characters and analyse their complex and shifting emotions so effectively that readers in any generation are able to relate to them. Admittedly some of the minor players are caricatures, such as the complacent, censorious inhabitants of Middlemarch, but the main protagonists are portrayed in such depth, both strengths and failings, that we even find ourselves feeling a twinge of sympathy for the canting hypocrite, non-conformist banker Bulstrode when he receives his final reckoning.

Culled from two separate earlier stories, the main storylines are interwoven, contrasting the fortunes of two idealistic individuals: the wealthy well-born Dorothea, filled with the earnest but unfocused desire to make a difference in the world, and the ambitious young pioneering doctor Tertius Lydgate, determined to make his mark in furthering medical knowledge. Restricted by the naivety stemming from a sheltered upbringing and a lack of education to match her intelligence, Dorothea makes the mistake of marrying a selfish pedant, whose dry-as-dust research project has run into the ground. Her gradual realisation of the hollowness of his talent and the meanness of his outlook is made all the more poignant by the appearance on the scene of Casaubon’s intelligent and attractive young relative Will Ladislaw, who could not present a greater contrast in his open-minded spontaneity. An unwise marriage is also Lydgate’s downfall, since the lovely but shallow and materialistic Rosamund is neither willing or able to support him in achieving his aims.

With its web of many well-developed, diverse characters and entertaining sub-plots, this is a kind of glorious literary soap opera, by turns humorous and poignant, set against a background of industrial and political revolution: the drives to extend the vote under the controversial Reform Act, and to develop the railways, seen as a mystifying and needless threat to civilised life by many in Middlemarch. Just occasionally, George Eliot falls prey to the prejudices of her time: anti-Semitic asides and snobbish descriptions of some low-born characters such as the “frog-faced” Joshua Rigg, bastard son of the perverse Featherstone, whose highest ambition is to use his unexpected inheritance to set himself up in the despised profession of moneychanger. Yet overall one is impressed by the sheer force of the author’s intellect, and struck by the irony that a female writer of this calibre was obliged to write under a male pseudonym.

I am not sure whether George Eliot felt required to indulge in the flowery disquisitions so popular in Victorian writing, or revelled in displaying her skill in this, but I have to admit to struggling with some of these passages, not least where words have changed in their meaning, or turns of phrase become too convoluted for our preferred sparer style. Yet most descriptions and dialogues sizzle with a sharp wit which would not seem out of place in a modern novel.

Less bleak than “The Mill on the Floss” or “Silas Marner”, “Middlemarch” deserves to be called one of the greatest English novels of the nineteenth century.

24 people found this helpful

journojohnson

A great story with all the characters stories interlinking with the main character

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 June 2019

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This is by far one of my favourite books. Although it is a long Victorian novel, I must have read it two or three times. Originally I read it at University and fell in love with the main hero, Will Ladislaw. Now as I have got older I appreciate the book on a much deeper level. Dorothea Brooke is the main character, a bit of a stoic intellectual. Her story and subsequent first marriage to a rather dull pedant, Edward Casaubon, interlinks with all the stories of the other characters and their worlds in a most intricate and amazing way. Of course, Dorothea mellows and accepts the proposal of Will even though this means she will be cut off from her previous husband, Casaubon's inheritance because of his envious and mean spirit. But we also see how Dorothea matures to help others misfortunes and circumstances particularly the fortunes of the local doctor, Lydgate. This book never ceases to move and enchant me. I could read it again and again.

7 people found this helpful

gnomen

Great book; recommend the Oxford Classics edition

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 November 2015

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George Eliot is a fantastic author -- less well known than other 19th C. greats, she has deep insights into people, behaviour, psychology, philosophy -- the issues of her day and of ours. Also recommend Daniel Deronda to those who have not come across it.

Maybe like me, you are looking for a clean kindle copy with proper editing and footnotes rather than one of the scanned cheap versions with typos and other mistakes that are everywhere and useless. I found the Oxford Classics versions of both Middlemarch and Deronda are very good and still very inexpensive. Just add "Oxford Classics" to the title you are searching for.

There may be other good publishers too (do post if you find one) but most of the mainstream publishers do not provide kindle versions of their classics.

24 people found this helpful

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