Kick-Back Friday: #72

Middlemarch (1994): If you can't get through the book (I'm talking to you, English majors), then watch the BBC mini-series—a highly faithful adaptation of George Eliot's novel (written by Andrew Davies of Pride and Prejudice fame).

Dorothea Brooke believes that life's purpose can be found in marriage to a fussy academic, the elderly Reverend Casabaun, while she cultivates a sympathic friendship with his disinherited cousin, the fetching Will Ladislaw (Rufus Sewell). The parallel lives of two other couples (the earnest Dr. Lydgate and his spoiled wife; a ne'er-do-well aristocrat and his long-suffering country sweetheart) are intertwined for the obligatory contrast and comparison.