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Middlemarch, George Eliot’s seventh novel set during the tumultuous era of the Reform Bill, has famously been described by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grownup people." Yet what might this oft-repeated judgment mean? In this seminar we will use Woolf’s proclamation as an initial touchstone to explore how Middlemarch reinvents its key terms: Englishness, the novel form, and what it means to be “grownup.” Doing so will mean inhabiting the world of a small English town and its provincial dramas—gossip, marriage, and country estates—and those forces that seem to threaten it from the outside: reform, modernity, colonialism, and the cholera. Together we will explore how Eliot’s great work brims with the aliveness of its historical moment and continues to resonate in our present.