Middlemarch by George Eliot.
quote Anthony Trollope: I doubt whether any young person can read with pleasure Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch. I know they are very difficult to many that are not young. George Eliot struggles too hard to do work that is excellent. She lacks ease. Latterly...her style has become occasionally obscure from her too great desire to be pungent. It is impossible not to feel the struggle... I agree that I did not find this work as enjoyable as Eliot's earlier works, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, and Silas Marner. However, Middlemarch is still a great work and worthy of reading entirely at least once and in parts, several times. George Eliot was an authoress at a time when it was difficult to be accepted as producing anything serious. It was a time of difficulty for a woman to be anything other than a wife. To have a great mind and intellect, as she obviously had, was not rewarded and commended as it would have been in our times. She was in the main a self taught ...