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 Middlemarch as a 'treasurehouse of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.

Great poetry 'finds its way to the hearts of many, not just the minds of the few', and this delightful collection is the ideal way to browse, remember and enjoy some of poetry's greatest hits. Following in the bestselling footsteps of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", the first poetry anthology from Ana Sampson, "Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright" contains verses from more than eighty of the world's favourite poets, from the thirteenth century to the present day. It includes such leading lyricists as Burns, Keats, Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney - taking in the work of W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Wilfred Owen, and many others along the way. Perfect to dip into on the reader's whim, the chapters cover childhood and youth, nature, love and romance, home and travel, elegies, a

When the young and beautiful Dorothea Brooke marries the aging scholar, Edward Casaubon, the people of Middlemarch believe that no good will come of it. Dorothea quickly grows unhappy and bored. Then she begins a sensitive friendship with Casaubon’s young cousin, Will Ladislaw. Meanwhile, the beautiful but spoilt Rosamond Vincey pursues the idealistic but poor Doctor Lydgate. Lydgate is determined not to get married, but Rosamond has other ideas… Recommended for older readers.

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 one level, is tragedy.