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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Middlemarch
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, a study of provincial life (1871–2) Novel by George *Eliot which, as its subtitle states, provides a detailed panorama of life in Middlemarch, a provincial town in Loamshire. The central character is the idealistic Dorothea Brooke. She makes a disastrous marriage to the pedantic Edward Casaubon (working on an interminable Key to All Mythologies) and gradually discovers her affection for his cheerful young cousin, Will Ladislaw; Casaubon attempts to ruin her future by a codicil denying her his fortune if she marries Will, but after his death they acknowledge their love and renounce the money.
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Prominent also in the town are Tertius Lydgate, a talented doctor whose life is ruined by the social pretensions of his wife, Rosamund; her brother Fred and his childhood sweetheart, Mary Garth; and Mr Bulstrode, a hypocritical banker with a shady past. But the novel's densely woven fabric, offering many other characters with almost equal demands on the reader's interest, results in Middlemarch itself becoming the theme of the book.
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