Writing at the very moment when the foundations of Western thought were being challenged and undermined, George Eliot fashions in Middlemarch a concept of life and society free of the past's dogma yet able to confront the scepticism that was taking over the age. Felicia Bonaparte has provided a new Introduction for this updated edition, the text of which is taken from David Carroll's Clarendon Middlemarch (1986), the first critical edition.