Middlemarch: an accolade for George Eliot

Middlemarch by George Eliot has been voted the best novel of all time in a Guardian poll of writers, academics and critics. A 900-page portrait of 19th-century provincial life it is not embraced with the same enthusiasm as Austen, Bronte or Dickens but Virgina Woolf declared it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”; and Martin Amis called it “a novel without weaknesses”. Unlike Austen it does not lead up the golden staircase to an enchanted marr