Middlemarch

Middlemarch consistently pokes through to the disorder that lies at the heart of a seemingly orderly society.
Frederick R. Karl, George Eliot: Voice of a Century (W.W. Norton and Company, 1995)

The necessary part of great intellectual powers in such a success as Middlemarch is obvious.  The sub-title of the book is A Study of Provincial Life, and it is no idle pretension.  The sheer informedness about society, its mechanism, the way in which people of different classes live and (if they have to) earn their livelihoods, impresses us with its range, and it is real knowledge; that is, it is knowledge alive with understanding.
F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (NYU Press, 1969)

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin, 1871).

I must admit I find it a bit hard to understand why some people find Middlemarch intimidating.  Surely it can't be the length, since that has not stopped the popularity of Donna Tartt's The Gold Finch, at 775 pages (the Penguin edition of Middlemarch is 896 pages) .  Is it the politics of the first reform bill in England?  But that plays only a very small part, and English politics does not seem to keep readers away from Trollope.  Perhaps the characters are too complex and the plotting too diffuse, especially after the scholar Casaubon dies midway through the book.  I have found an effective way to read Eliot, i.e., read a minimum of a chapter a day.  Most days I read more than one chapter but having a minimum kept me involved with admittedly complex characters in a complex plot.  I think there is also something of a paradox at work, in that Masterpiece Theatre productions have led some people to the books being filmed but also have distanced people from them, causing them to think that these characters who drive horse-drawn carriages instead of motorcars are different from us.  But many of the characters in Middlemarch are not so different from those in small towns today:

Tertius Lydgate is a doctor who wants to be a great scientist, but also wants to make money to support his status-driven wife, Rosamond.  His gradual descent into bankruptcy is vividly portrayed.

Dorothea Brooke is an ambitious woman who finds that the most important thing she can do is marry the older Edward Casaubon and support his work on The Key to All Mythologies.  When Casaubon dies with the marriage apparently unconsummated, she marries the young and passionate Will Ladislaw, who had mocked Casaubon's "mouldy futilities."

Dorothea's sister Celia has a traditional and happy marriage.

The feckless Fred Vincy is finally able to obtain a job he likes and wed Mary Garth.

Mr. Bulstrode is blackmailed for his youthful indiscretions by the seedy Raffles, in a subplot that reminds one of Wilkie Collins.

Mr. Featherstone dies and his will causes havoc in Middlemarch, as does Casaubon's.

Woven within the stories of these characters are parents, relatives, tradesmen, clergymen and the various busybodies of Middlemarch, as beautifully portrayed in physical and psychological detail as the more important characters,

Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness.  It is still the beginning of the home epic -- the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.