Middlemarch
          Often called the greatest nineteenth-century British novelist, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) created in Middlemarch a vast panorama of life in a provincial Midlands town. At the story’s center stands the intellectual and idealistic Dorothea Brooke — a character who in many ways resembles Eliot herself.
But the very qualities that set Dorothea apart from the materialistic, mean-spirited society around her also lead her into a disastrous marriage with a man she mistakes for her soul mate. In a parallel story, young doctor Tertius Lydgate, who is equally idealistic, falls in love with the pretty but vain and superficial Rosamund Vincy, whom he marries to his ruin.
Eliot surrounds her main figures with a gallery of characters drawn from every social class, from laborers and shopkeepers to the rising middle class to members of the wealthy, landed gentry. Together they form an extraordinarily rich and precisely detailed portrait of English provincial life in the 1830s. But Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s struggles to retain their moral integrity in the midst of temptation and tragedy remind us that their world is very much like our own. Strikingly modern in its painful ironies and psychological insight, Middlemarch was pivotal in the shaping of twentieth-century literary realism.

Silas Marner
          Every day Silas works hard and every night he takes his gold out and holds the coins lovingly, counting them again and again. He has no family, no friends. Only the gold is his friend. But what if a thief comes and takes his gold away? What would Silas do then? What could comfort him for the loss of his only friend?
Silas Marner tells the vivid tale of a reclusive miser who finds redemption through the love of an abandoned child. Like many of the other works of George Eliot (the pen name of the novelist Mary Anne Evans), it makes poignantly real the folkways, charms, and perils of rural English life, while exploring universal themes – wealth and poverty, greed and love, the nature of happiness – with penetrating psychological insight.

Amos Barton
          One of the many astounding works where Eliot deals with Christian values in a provincial setting. She imparts psychological depth to the characters and lends a realistic touch to her works. As the characters fight and survive in the battle of life, the reader is rapt by the style and form of the narrative.
The Revd Amos Barton is the curate in a small English town, and as always a central feature of the small English town is its gossip. Gossip is one of our main sources of information, even though we also have the benefit of an omniscient first-person narrator, who himself (herself?) grew up in the town. That narrator is telling us about the past, and to do so, zaps us into the drawing room (or whatever) of some local personality (e.g., “Mrs Patten, a childless old lady, who had gotten rich chiefly by the negative process of spending nothing”), sets the scene in the present tense (e.g., “the home-made muffins glisten with an inviting succulence”)….