Description: Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed the passionate artist Will and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel's rich comic vein.