George Eliot · 1872 · exile

George Eliot's Study of Provincial Life, which Virginia Woolf called one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. Almost all of it happens inside a few miles of a Midlands town modelled on Coventry - and the one journey out of it, a honeymoon in Rome, is the most famous unhappiness in English fiction.

1. 1
   Tipton Grange

   Mr Brooke's estate, where Dorothea is nineteen and wants to reform cottages and improve the world, and nobody can imagine why - so she marries the elderly scholar next door on the theory that his work will give her a use.

2. 2
   Freshitt Hall

   Sir James Chettam's adjoining land, and the marriage everyone expects: property joined to property, a baronet in love with her, and Dorothea declining him without ever noticing he was asking - which Celia has to explain afterwards.

3. 3
   Lowick Manor

   Casaubon's house five miles off, dark and airless, where she discovers that the Key to All Mythologies is a heap of notes going nowhere - and meets Will Ladislaw, his young cousin, who can see what she is worth.

4. 4
   Middlemarch

   The silk-ribbon town Eliot built out of Coventry: Lydgate's fever hospital and his ruinous marriage, Bulstrode's banking and the man from his past who knows where the money came from, and the web pulling tight.

5. 5
   Houndsley

   The unsanitary horse-trading town just outside, where Fred Vincy buys a bad horse on credit - and the debt runs through the Garths and nearly ruins them, which is Eliot showing how money moves through people who never meet.

6. 6
   Rome

   The honeymoon, and the most famous unhappiness in English fiction: Dorothea weeping in her lodgings among the ruins and the marble, six weeks married, understanding what she has done - and Will arriving and seeing it at once.

7. 7
   Lowick

   Casaubon dies leaving a codicil that disinherits her if she marries Ladislaw - an insult from beyond the grave that tells the whole county what he suspected, and makes it nearly impossible for her to act on it.

8. 8
   London

   She gives up the estate and the money and marries him anyway, and they go to London where he becomes a reforming MP - and the growing good of the world, Eliot says, depends on unhistoric acts.