The object of his love, Hetty, is a sublimely beautiful but soulless creature. Towards women he’s more tolerant, and it is this strange chivalrous inconsistency that proves his undoing. He’s constitutionally incapable of shilly-shallying: “…I don’t remember ever being see-saw in that way, when I’d made my mind up, as you say, that a thing was wrong.” His fatal flaw is hardness: strongwilled himself, he’s harsh towards men with any moral weakness. He feels himself succumbing to temptation – in the form of Hetty Sorrel, his social inferior – yet a series of accidents and missed opportunities leads him into a liaison of which, in his time and day, the outcome must be infamy at best, tragedy at worst.Īdam, the novel’s protagonist, is arrow-straight in both intention and action. The county hangs its hopes on his successor, his grandson Captain Arthur Donnithorne.Īrthur is generous, candid, and well-educated: concocting ambitious but realistic plans to improve his future tenants’ lives, seeking opportunities to further the wellbeing of individual tenants. The current landlord is shrivelled, stingy, unpopular Squire Donnithorne.

Adam meanwhile is in love with Hetty Sorrel, an orphan being raised by the Poysers, her relatives, prosperous tenant farmers. Dinah’s a preacher, and dedicated to singlehood, much to the distress of Seth, who’s in love with her. Dinah is a modern-day Jesus, the novel’s guiding light: her heart has room for all humanity, her vision is clear, and she has no more sense of self than a bird. Seth has converted to Methodism: that’s how Dinah Morris enters the story. Adam Bede is a skilled young carpenter with his head on his shoulders his younger brother Seth is softhearted but absentminded. The novel begins in a fictitious location in south England in 1799: the fertile, agrarian Loamshire, and its neighbouring country, barren Stonyshire. If you and I can learn to look at the world as she did, we’ll be the better for it. But Eliot’s best gift is the light of her eyes, which is like the light of an overcast summer day: calm, clear, and even. The characters are finely etched: even the minor characters will leave their voices in their head long afterwards. Adam Bede, her debut, published when she was forty, is perhaps her most accessible novel: featuring the transcendently beautiful Hetty Sorrel, multiple love triangles, class conflict, abundant comic relief and witty sparring, fistfights, a scandal in a sleepy village, and a murder trial. Her gaze penetrates, through the fog of custom and commonsense, to the soul of every living thing for sinner and saint she has the same deeply felt but dispassionate love. She has an eye for character and an ear for voices. George Eliot is one of my favourite novelists.

Adam george eliot