Where to start with George Eliot

British novelist, 1819–1880.

Best George Eliot book to start with: Middlemarch (1871), on 8 of the 13 lists it could have made.

Middlemarch is the one to read, if you have the time. It is long, set in a provincial English town around 1830, and it weaves several lives together: a young woman who wants a purpose, a doctor with new ideas, and a marriage that goes wrong. It moves faster than its reputation, and Eliot’s habit of stepping back to comment on her characters is part of the pleasure. Read a few chapters before you decide, because the town and its families take a little while to become clear.

If Middlemarch looks too large, The Mill on the Floss is the better first book. It is shorter, it begins with a brother and sister growing up beside a river.

Daniel Deronda is her last novel and the least read of the three. It runs two stories side by side, a spoiled young woman’s marriage and a young man’s discovery of his own past. Come to it third, once you know how she builds a book.