Middlemarch

George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr. Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for adult people'.

George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann, or Marion, Evans (1819-1880), was the author of several novels including Silas Marner. Middlemarch is considered not only her finest work, but one of the greatest English novels of the 19th century.

Kate Reading has narrated everything from Erma Bombeck to George Elliot. She has worked for many years for the Library of Congress Talking Books for the Blind, a program for the blind and physically handicapped. She has received several Audiofile Earphones Awards: for Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, The Last Precinct by Patricia Cornwell, and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Kate lives in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area with her husband, narrator Michael Kramer, with whom she recorded Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Kate also works as an actor in the Washington area, where she is a company member at the Woolly Mammoth theatre, and has appeared at many local theatres.