George Eliot’s masterpiece of provincial life still has much to teach us about sympathy and tolerance George Eliot’s masterpiece of provincial life still has much to teach us about sympathy and tolerance V irgina Woolf declared Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” . Henry James said that some of its scenes were the most intelligent in English fiction. Even Martin Amis, over 100 years later, called it “a novel without weaknesses” . Now this 900-page portrait of