Middlemarch, by George Eliot

There are few novels with a theme of self-sacrifice and redemption. Most of the great ones seem to fit in this category. Eliot gives us not one, not two, but three redemption stories in one tender novel. Eliot believed that art should serve a purpose. She said: "If art does not enlarge men's sympathies it does nothing morally. I have had heart-cutting experience that opinions are a poor cement between human souls, and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures." She achieves this by letting us into the heart and soul of each of her characters. We sympathize fully with both saints and sinners, feeling their exaltation and their grief. Few books have moved me as this one has.