Adam Bede

by George Eliot

This was my most recent Classics Club Spin pick. I always enjoy George Eliot – such a gifted writer and so skilled at providing character and setting. It’s now a couple of weeks since I finished it – I wanted to let it stew a while to see what aspects remained with me after reading several other books. Unusually for me, I still recall quite a lot. I have pictures in my head of several characters (though I have forgotten most of their names), and have a strong sense of the countryside and the general village life, including that of the farmers, the tradesmen, and the gentry, all of which I found quite fascinating. This is George Eliot’s genius I think. There are aspects of the book that I can see would be difficult for some readers – there is some discussion of politics and religious discord that were apparently happening at that time, and lots of dialogue spelled in a way to represent characters’ accents, which was somewhat tedious, but also interesting to me as a linguist and Speech Pathologist. The storyline is somewhat predictable, but the characters so well-drawn, with behaviours unbelievably shocking in our context, though representative of the times. Even so, all the characters can be recognised as types we would see today – the beautiful young airhead who attracts all the men but has little understanding of who would suit her, the naive but solid and caring tradesman who only sees the pretty girl and not her frivolous nature, the privileged playboy, the salt-of-the-earth farmers, etc, etc. It is good to be reminded of how far we have come socially – the lives of women in those times were especially powerless and this is made abundantly clear in this story.

A very worth-while read.