The experience of reading Middlemarch for the first time is an experience of gradual surrender. The novel is long (800 pages) and the first hundred are slow. George Eliot is establishing a world, introducing too many characters, and being discursive in a way that hasn't been fashionable since the Victorian period. The temptation to skim is real.

If you resist that temptation, somewhere around page 200 the novel becomes the best thing you've ever read. The characters deepen. The relationships complicate. Eliot's commentary on them — she editorializes directly, which modern fiction teaches us not to do — becomes the voice of someone who has thought more carefully about human nature than almost any novelist since.

The famous last line — about the growing good of the world depending on unhistoric acts, and the rest flowing into those who lived faithfully a hidden life — is one of the great sentences in the language. It means more on the final page than it would mean read in isolation.