I identified with Dorothea, naturally, and cringed at the idea of having Casaubon's hands all over me. When I first read Middlemarch as a teenager, I was consumed by what deconstructionist critics call 'the marriage plot' and the rest of us call the love story. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian 'Now when I reread it I want to urge Dorothea to stay exactly as she is at the start' Kathryn Hughes So that is the Dickens way of implying sex. Mr Gradgrind says he does not understand the relevance of the remark. In Hard Times, when Gradgrind is fixing up for Louisa to marry the middle-aged Mr Bounderby, she looks out at the industrial landscape – 'see those chimneys father, at night fire comes out of them' – an attempt to imply the very obvious image of sexuality. Eliot's book came at the time that writers were trying to suggest something about sexuality with a very limited vocabulary.

It is clear that it is the sensuality of the paintings that alarms her – she is about to experience some fulfilment with Ladislaw. When she goes to the art gallery in Italy and someone asks her about it she says she finds the paintings frightening. Dorothea's sexuality is very interesting, as her marriage to Casaubon is clearly unconsummated. I reread it in my 30s with completely undiminished admiration. So another proof of greatness is that it renews itself for every generation. Neither read English at university and both thought it was amazing. I first read it in my late teens and both my sons have read it recently. It's a novel without weaknesses, except perhaps Will Ladislaw is a little too light and romantic – he's a bit underweight for a novel so ample and deep. I would say that it is the central English novel. Meanwhile, I don't think there is much argument about Middlemarch being the novel of the 19th century.

Daniel Deronda, which came after, was an enormous worldwide success, but it is very hard going and is hardly read at all now. It is interesting that during her life Middlemarch wasn't George Eliot's greatest achievement.

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