Middlemarch

In a provincial English town in the years before the Reform Act of 1832, several lives cross. Dorothea Brooke, idealistic and serious, marries an elderly scholar in the hope of sharing great work and finds herself shut in with a dry, jealous man. The ambitious young doctor Lydgate marries the pretty Rosamond and is slowly worn down by debt, while the town's pious banker hides a shameful past.

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), who chose a male name so that her work would be taken seriously. Middlemarch, published in parts in 1871 and 1872, is often called the greatest English novel; Virginia Woolf praised it as one of the few written for grown-up people. Start with Silas Marner if you want a shorter Eliot.