Middlemarch

Eliot follows several main storylines. Dorothea soon realizes that her husband is cold and that his life's work, a vast study of the world's mythologies, will never be finished. She develops a friendship with Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's lively young cousin, which provokes jealousy and a cruel condition in Casaubon's will. Lydgate, meanwhile, marries Rosamond, and their expensive tastes lead to growing debts that threaten his career and ideals.

Around them are other memorable characters: Fred Vincy, Rosamond's charming but aimless brother, who hopes to inherit money and must prove himself to win the sensible Mary Garth, and Nicholas Bulstrode, a powerful banker whose hidden past returns to haunt him and draws Lydgate into scandal. Political change, including the Reform Act of 1832, the arrival of the railway and new ideas in medicine, form the background. Eliot's narrator comments with warmth and irony on the characters' self-deceptions, and the novel's power lies in its understanding of how small choices shape lives.

Long and slow but deeply rewarding, a novel many readers return to at different ages. About 912 pages in the Signet Classics edition.