Excellent value at the price, though I do wish conscientiously that I found Middlemarch just a little more compelling to read - the Long Victorian Novel par excellence. George Eliot was one of those deliberate, ultra careful writers who waste nothing and leave - out nothing; her slow narrative pace and her love of analysis and commentary and literary quotations, along with a tendency to moralise and to inform you regularly in little confidential asides about the state of play, are all rather anti pathetic to an age which, to quote Francis Bacon, wants the grin without the cat. Silas Marner is not only terser but, in my own opinion, also more emotionally gripping, though the consensus of critical opinion is that Middlemarch is Eliot's masterpiece. The Leavisites - are there many left? - can be trusted to argue that question to the finish. Meanwhile Penguin Books have reissued The Mill on the Floss (£3.99 in UK), which it seems is "now a captivating new film". The blurb claims that Maggie Tulliver is "one of the great heroines of English literature" - certainly she is much preferable to the wimpish Dorothea in Middlemarch.