In Defence of Edward Casaubon
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It is now almost axiomatic, in some circles, to hold up Middlemarch as ‘the best British novel of all time’. George Eliot’s tome, adored by Virginia Woolf and Michael Gove alike, would have a sturdier claim to that accolade were it not for the fact that its most interesting and engaging character drops dead half-way through. Edward Casaubon is killed off at the end of the book that Eliot fittingly named ‘Waiting for Death’. After that point, for the remaining five books, Middlemarch meekly meanders like an epic without a hero.