Dorothea Brooke, a young woman of impeccable character, marries the embittered Mr. Casaubon, who almost immediately dies. Eliot takes the reader through a labyrinth of nineteenth-century morals and conventions as Dorothea searches for fulfillment and happiness. Middlemarch stands above its large and varied fictional community, picking up and examining characters like a jeweler observing stones. There is Lydgate, a struggling young doctor in love with the beautiful but unsuitable Rosamond Vincy; Rosamond's gambling brother Fred and his love, the plain-speaking Mary Garth; Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's attractive cousin, and the ever-curious Mrs. Cadwallader. The characters mingle and interact, bowing and turning in an intricate dance of social expectations and desires.

Lardner began as a sportswriter in 1905, and worked for several papers in Indiana, Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis. While a sportswriter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune, he wrote a series of baseball short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. These satirical stories, featuring the letters of an egotistical Chicago White Sox pitcher, Jack Keefe, were praised by Virginia Woolf among many others. Lardner wrote two more books featuring Keefe - Treat 'Em Rough and The Real Dope - and several other collections of stories featuring characters from Broadway, sports, and the workaday world. One of America's great sardonic humorists, his use of the American vernacular has rarely been surpassed.