"And that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Middlemarch is everything modern novels are not. Dozens of point-of-view characters, the narrator a character that gives opinions and speaks directly to the reader, excessive switching of points of view (what we writers call headhopping), an intricately interwoven cast of characters, 904 pages detailing every aspect of life in Georgian England. And yet it is astoundingly brilliant.

Marian Evans wrote under the male pseudonym George Eliot in order to have her work taken seriously. Also, to shield that she lived with a man she was not married to. Quite a modern woman in the Victorian age!