She also has a gift for epigram, for instance, “It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined taste!” These depictions are nostalgic without being sentimental. To appreciate Eliot, you must also allow time for her detailed descriptions of the countryside, its produce, its seasons, and its dwellers. By the time Eliot writes of “a little trivial soul like Hetty’s,” I was impatient, having gotten the point. This is especially so with the self-absorbed Hetty (a forerunner of Rosamunde in Middlemarch). Yet Dinah’s fervor is rendered with no trace of irony.Įliot’s famed psychological acuity is on full display in this book, but at times I wished she explained less and let the plot and dialogue show us more. This struck me particularly because Eliot had found and then lost religious faith.

It’s harder to create a convincing portrait of a thoroughly good person than one who is flawed, but in Dinah, Eliot draws a second good character alongside Adam. I’ll find out more when I get to the next chapter of Haight’s biography of the author, which I’m reading in sync with Eliot’s books.Ĭontrasting with Hetty is Dinah, a Methodist lay preacher.

Then again, the core of the plot, the fate of Hetty Sorrel, was related to Eliot by her aunt, so that’s likely to have been the germ of the book from the start. Irwine before the other characters ran away with the tale. After reading the first half of the third of these, “Janet’s Repentance,” her publisher, John Blackwood, complained, “When are you going to give us a really good active clergyman, neither absurdly evangelical nor absurdly High Church?” Perhaps that’s what Eliot set out to do when she created Mr. Before writing this novel, Eliot had written a series of stories featuring clergymen (collected in her first book, Scenes of Clerical Life. He has faults, but these stem from his highly-principled nature and are softened by suffering.Ī key minor character is Mr. Still, Adam is a strong character, an example of a genuinely good man. This book bears the name of an individual, but at times, it seems misnamed since there are other strong figures, such as Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris, on whom the narrative focuses.

Adam bede author