Middlemarch — George Eliot (1871)

Middlemarch, frequently hailed as the greatest novel in the English language by wide critical consensus, offers a panoramic examination of provincial English life through two parallel stories of idealistic marriage failure. Mary Ann Evans (writing as George Eliot) develops 10 major characters with a compassion, intelligence, and complexity that surpasses typical Victorian works. It achieves richer psychological depth than the average novel of its era, Virginia Woolf herself calling it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.' The novel has sold over 2 million copies since 1900 and remains a staple of academic curricula worldwide.