The volume contains Adam Bede Eliot's first full-length novel, Middlemarch, a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. The Mill on the Floss, a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age and Silas Marner, a tender and moving story of the unjustly exiled linen weaver, Silas Marner of Raveloe.