Classics · Similar reads
Books like Middlemarch
The best books like Middlemarch are Pride and Prejudice, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and Man's Search for Meaning. Middlemarch by George Eliot is about idealism and compromise, marriage and self-determination, provincial society and ambition. If that's what drew you in, here are 12 books that share its DNA — each summarized on Superbook, and ready to chat with in the app.
- Pride and Prejudice
01
Jane Austen · Classics
Pride and Prejudice opens with one of the most famous sentences in English literature and immediately establishes its ironic mode: a truth universally acknowledged turns out to be a social pressure universally imposed.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
02
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari · History
Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Man's Search for Meaning
03
Viktor E. Frankl · Psychology
Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's account of his years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and the psychological theory he developed from that experience.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Emotional Intelligence
04
Daniel Goleman · Psychology
Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, made a widely influential argument: that the cluster of abilities involved in managing emotions — self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skill — predicts life outcomes at least as well as IQ, and possibly better in many domains.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Becoming
05
Michelle Obama · Memoir
Becoming is Michelle Obama's account of how a girl from a modest house on Chicago's South Side became one of the most recognized people in the world — and what that journey cost and revealed.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
06
Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
Paul Bloom · Psychology
Paul Bloom's central question is how much morality is innate versus learned.
Both dig into moral development.
Read the summary → - Bleak House
07
Charles Dickens · Classics
Bleak House is organized around the interminable Chancery case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce — a legal dispute over a will that has been grinding through the Court of Chancery for decades, consuming the fortunes and lives of everyone attached to it.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Candide
08
Voltaire · Classics
Candide is a young man raised in a Westphalian castle on the philosophy of his tutor Pangloss: that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - David Copperfield
09
Charles Dickens · Classics
David Copperfield is the novel Dickens called his "favourite child" — a first-person bildungsroman that tracks David from a motherless childhood in Suffolk through blacking-factory misery (barely disguised autobiography), education, early work in London, two marriages, and eventual literary success.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Doctor Zhivago
10
Boris Pasternak · Classics
Doctor Zhivago is the novel Boris Pasternak spent much of his adult life writing and which the Soviet state refused to publish, leading to its smuggled publication in Italian in 1957.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Emma
11
Jane Austen · Classics
Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever, and rich, and she has been comfortable and a little bit wrong about things her entire life.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Far from the Madding Crowd
12
Thomas Hardy · Classics
Far from the Madding Crowd is Thomas Hardy's breakthrough novel and remains his most accessible — the one with the strongest balance of romantic plot and pastoral beauty, where the landscape of Dorset feels like abundance rather than trap.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary →
Books like Middlemarch: quick answers
What are the best books like Middlemarch?
The best books like Middlemarch by George Eliot are Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Becoming by Michelle Obama, plus 7 more below. Each was chosen for themes it shares with Middlemarch, such as idealism and compromise, marriage and self-determination, provincial society and ambition.
What should I read after Middlemarch?
A natural next read after Middlemarch is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. A kindred classics read. Other strong choices are Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.
What books are similar to Middlemarch by George Eliot?
Middlemarch centers on idealism and compromise, marriage and self-determination, provincial society and ambition. Books with a similar feel include Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Becoming by Michelle Obama, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil by Paul Bloom — all free to read and chat with on Superbook.
