Middlemarch by George Eliot

This novel takes the whole of a town in provincial England just before the passage of the Reform Bill as its subject. Eliot exposes the egotism of most of her characters, while offering both idealist (Dorothea Brooke) and realist (Mary Garth) alternatives to a self-centered way of living. This time around, I kept getting the feeling that if they had met each other a little bit earlier Dorothea and Lydgate might have been good for each other.