George Eliot paints a luminous and spacious landscape of life in a provincial town, interweaving her themes with a proliferation of characters: Dorothea, an innocent idealist hemmed in by social life that seemed nothing more than a labyrinth of petty causes; Dr Lydgate, the young doctor, defeated by self and circumstance; Rosamond, who possesses the naive but deadly egoism of the spoilt child; the chill and impotent Casaubon who lives 'too much with the dead'; and Bulstrode, who chokes his conscience with doctrinal justification.

Travels with Inkheart's English Box.