Society, love, property, and life, as England struggles with Reform and a great-hearted woman struggles to be significant.

Try not to think too much about the BBC adaptation as you read: several of the characters were IMHO radically mis-cast. In particular, Rosamond is not as visually perfect as she is in my inward eye: to make Eliot’s point, Rosamond would have to be played by an actress significantly more conventionally, flawlessly beautiful than the actress playing Dorothea, but that would break even the BBC’s unwritten casting laws (far laxer though they are than Hollywood’s).

But my objections may just be the usual, that this is one of my favorite books and no filming can match how it looks in my mind.