Middlemarch
Virginia Woolf called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." A whole provincial town rendered with moral intelligence no other Victorian novelist matched. George Eliot proved what the novel could do when it took the interior life of women seriously. The standard-bearer for realist fiction in English.
"Dorothea is an insufferable, stuck-up know-it-all and I hate her." So runs one reader's verdict on the moral center, and even an eminent admirer of the book conceded she can strike a modern reader as "a blue-stocking bore." The logistics wear people down before the philosophy does: one reader "confused a lot of the characters because everyone's name begins with F," and the middle is a dry flat of introductions and essayistic asides indistinguishable from plot. Two hundred pages of marriage-prospect arithmetic pass before anything resembling an event. "Totally unnatural, asexual characters," complains another; nobody in the county appears to have a body. And underneath it all, the simplest objection: "I am sick of books being too long." The wit is real. The wait is unconscionable.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
