Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town is set during the time of social unrest prior to the first Reform of 1832. It 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 Middlemarch as a "treasure-house of detail" while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.