English · Advanced
Read Middlemarch in Englishwith every sentence explained
George Eliot · 1871
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About the book
Middlemarch by George Eliot was first published in 1871. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 315,400 words.
One English town. Dozens of lives. Big dreams colliding with ordinary reality.
Middlemarch is a provincial town in the English Midlands around 1830, a time of railways, reform and change. Dorothea Brooke is young, rich and passionately idealistic; she longs to do something great with her life, and believes she has found her purpose in marrying Mr. Casaubon, a dry, elderly scholar many years older than she is.
Meanwhile Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor with modern ideas, arrives in town hoping to transform medicine, and finds himself drawn to the lovely Rosamond Vincy. Around them, bankers, clergymen, farmers and gossips all pursue their own hopes, secrets and mistakes.
George Eliot's great novel weaves these lives together with humour, wisdom and deep compassion. Long and rich, it is regularly named the greatest novel in the English language, and a perfect challenge for advanced readers.
- Author
- George Eliot
- First published
- 1871
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 315,400 words
How it opens
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.
Reading Middlemarch in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
