Middlemarch — George Eliot (1871)

Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Mary Ann Evans's panoramic novel of provincial English life examines two parallel stories of idealistic marriage failure — Dorothea Brooke's with Casaubon and Lydgate's with Rosamond — with a compassion, intelligence, and complexity that makes it, by wide critical consensus, the greatest novel in the English language.