The best novel in English. Sorry.

Chapter 20. The Roman honeymoon. Dorothea weeping in her lodgings among the ruins and the wall paintings, and Eliot stopping the narration to tell us that if we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence. I have read that aloud in a lecture theatre and watched a room of twenty-year-olds go completely quiet, which does not happen with anything else I teach.

What makes the novel great is not the sympathy, which everyone mentions. It's the distribution of it. Casaubon gets it. Casaubon — dry, jealous, doomed, wrong about his own life's work — is handed a passage in which we are asked to consider that he too has an equivalent centre of self, and the novel does not use that generosity to redeem him. He remains unbearable and he is understood. Very few novelists manage both at once. Tolstoy can, sometimes, when he isn't lecturing.

Objections, since a ten deserves them: the Lydgate hospital politics go on rather, the Ladislaw of the closing chapters is not the same creature as the Ladislaw of the first, and I've never entirely believed the ending is earned rather than arranged.

None of it matters! Get the Penguin with Rosemary Ashton's apparatus, avoid any edition whose introduction summarises the plot before you've read it, which is a real problem with this novel and with that publisher, and give yourself six weeks.