After enjoying Middlemarch, I decided to read all 7 of George Eliot's novels. This is the first, written in 1859. This one takes a wee bit of getting used to with the villager's way of speaking. I love Eliot's command of English, her broad breadth of knowledge, and the Spirituality she douses her stories in. ( )

George Eliot's first novel. A lot less complex, and easier read than Middlemarch. Adam loves Hetty, Hetty falls for the local squire. Hetty is a silly, very pretty teenage who has a very tragic fate.Dinah Morris is so saintly she doesn't feel like a real woman. ( )

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. Still, Adam is a strong character, an example of a genuinely good man. He has faults, but these stem from his highly-principled nature and are softened by suffering.
A key minor character is Mr. Irwine, the local rector. Before writing this novel, Eliot had written a series of stories featuring clergymen (collected in her first book, Scenes of Clerical Life. 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. Irwine before the other characters ran away with the tale.
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. 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.
Contrasting with Hetty is Dinah, a Methodist lay preacher. 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. This struck me particularly because Eliot had found and then lost religious faith. Yet Dinah’s fervor is rendered with no trace of irony.
Eliot’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 is especially so with the self-absorbed Hetty (a forerunner of Rosamunde in Middlemarch). By the time Eliot writes of “a little trivial soul like Hetty’s,” I was impatient, having gotten the point.
To appreciate Eliot, you must also allow time for her detailed descriptions of the countryside, its produce, its seasons, and its dwellers. These depictions are nostalgic without being sentimental. 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!”
I became so immersed in the world Eliot shows that I felt I was still in it for hours after finishing the book. This is one hallmark of a great book, one that outweighs the quibbles I’ve noted. ( )

Title and author: Adam Bede (1859) by George Eliot. Reviewed 4/29/23

Why I picked this book up: I opened this book because it was the first in The Banned Books Compendium: 32 Classic Forbidden Books.

Thoughts: George Eliot is a pen name of Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and others. I did not know George Eliot as a pen name for a female author. I never heard of this book before so for me if was new in multiple ways. Even though it went with the era I didn’t like the language much.

Why I finished this read: This author did a really good job IMO, of creating characters, symbolism, roles, power, a beautiful girl, it starts with flirtation, selfishness, crisis of faith and tragedy. There is a dynamic of characters, desires, decisions, death and legal consequences. I cannot condone the death and probably the reason for it beings banned which contributed to my low star rating .

Stars rating: Although I disagree with the decision in this book. I know millions of babies are aborted in the USA and that’s NOT to saying this book had that. Although the story was well written the decision sickened me and I really do not see that decision made in this book could have been made in my life. I will rate this story at a 1.5 stars. ( )

Another Eliot novel I enjoyed just fine, but which didn't come anywhere near the excellence of Middlemarch. Very good, though, in its depiction of rural life, and with some quite funny moments too. ( )