Middlemarch is the novel I recommend to people who want to understand what the novel as a form is for. Eliot is writing about a community in a specific historical moment — the reform era in England — but she is also writing about a question that is not historically contingent: whether individual aspiration matters in a world that has its own momentum.

Dorothea Brooke wants to do something large with her life. She fails to do anything large, by the standards of what she had imagined. Eliot's argument — located in the famous final paragraph — is that the accumulated effect of many people living decently in circumstances that don't allow for grand gestures is the actual engine of human progress. This is either consoling or devastating depending on where you are when you read it.

I've read the final paragraph forty times. It still works.