This novel was George Eliot's favourite. It concerns a bitter weaver who takes on a young orphan girl and gradually transforms his own life and that of the girl. The novel combines humour, rich symbolism and pointed social criticism to create an unsentimental portrait of rural English life.

Drawing on George Eliot's own childhood experiences to craft an unforgettable story of first love, sibling rivalry and regret, The Mill on the Floss is edited with an introduction and notes by A.S. Byatt, author of Possession, in Penguin Classics. Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds...

Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the chance to transform his life.

George Eliot's first full-length novel, Adam Bede paints a powerful portrait of rural life, seduction, faith, and redemption. First published in 1859, this innovative novel carried its readers back sixty years to a time of impending change for England and the wider world. Eliot's penetrating portrayal of the interaction of ordinary people brought a new social realism to the novel, in which humor and tragedy co-exist, and fellow-feeling is the mainstay of human relationships. This is the first edition based on Eliot's final revision of the novel in 1861, using the definitive Clarendon...

First published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859, "The Lifted Veil" is now one of George Eliot's most widely read and critically discussed short stories. A dark fantasy drawing on contemporary scientific interest in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism, phrenology, and experiments in revification, it is Eliot's anatomy of her own moral philosophy. Narrated by an egocentric, morbid young clairvoyant man, the story also explores fiction's ability to offer insight into the self, as well as being a remarkable portrait of an artist whose visionary powers merely blight his life.
Published as a...

In Middlemarch, in the heart of England, Dorothea wants to change the world and Dr Lydgate hopes to make great scientific discoveries. But after disastrous marriages, they both lose control of their lives. Can they ever achieve their dreams? Middlemarch is generally considered to be one of the greatest novels in the English language.

Introduction and Notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York.

This novel, based on George Eliot's own experiences of provincial life, is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age.

As the headstrong Maggie Tulliver grows into womanhood, the deep love which she has for her brother Tom turns into conflict, because she cannot reconcile his bourgeois standards with her own lively intelligence. Maggie is unable to adapt to her community or break free from it, and the result, on more than...

With an Introduction by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury

'Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your immediate feelings...'

Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot's first full-length novel, marked the emergence of an artist to rank with Scott and Dickens. Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eighteenth century, the book relates a story of seduction issuing in 'the inward...

Introduction and Notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York.

Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England - and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.

Silas Marner is a tender and moving tale of sin and repentance set in a vanished rural world and holds the reader's attention until the last...

Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.

Henry James described...