Quote by George Eliot: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”

If your life has no purpose beyond your own comfort, it feels hollow. Eliot argues that the real reason we exist is to ease each other's burdens — that kindness and mutual support are not optional extras but the very point of being alive.

Eliot wrote Middlemarch between 1869 and 1872, during the height of Victorian industrialization and class stratification. The novel was published in eight installments and immediately recognized as a landmark work addressing how social forces constrain individual lives, especially women's.

Pen name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the leading novelists of the Victorian era, whose works explored moral complexity and the inner lives of ordinary people. Her masterwork Middlemarch is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels in the English language.