Scan barcode
A review by eddie
George Eliot: Adam Bede/The Mill on the Floss/Silas Marner/Middlemarch by George Eliot
5.0
I studied the art history and the literature of the 19th century at university, but this is my first reading of Adam Bede, George Eliot’s debut novel (1859). It very much feels like the missing clue to decode a civilisation - the absolute nerve centre of Victorian Britain’s obsession with the status of women in society. Extraordinary to read it in the same year as ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘The Testaments’: truly, Eliot’s book is an authentic document from Gilead in England’s green and pleasant land.
So much later literature is indebted to this novel - Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd & Tess of the D’Urbevilles, and EM Forster’s Howard’s End for starters - John Foyles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman in more recent times too. Tess is virtually a rerun of Adam Bede (with Tess like Hetty in AB a milkmaid by profession, ‘ruined’ by an upper class landlord ) - but it’s interesting that Tess almost ended Hardy’s career despite it being written almost 40 years later. Hardy’s rerun takes the issues raised by Adam Bede and recasts them in the most confrontational form possible.
It’s jaw-dropping that Eliot published this at the height of Victorian prudishness and performative morality - a tale of illicit sex, pregnancy outside marriage, and infanticide - and not only survived to tell the tale but was immediately catapulted into the premier league of Victorian novelists, with the book being hailed as a masterpiece across the board.
How did she do it? On my reading of Middlemarch and Adam Bede, Eliot had a genius for creative ambiguity on these live-wire issues. She knew exactly how far she could push her culture, and when and exactly how to defend from attack her controversial points.
She carefully soothes patriarchy’s sensitivities while simultaneously leaving the subversive questions she raises about patriarchy and class exploitation hanging in the air for the alert reader to consider.
2019 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Eliot.
So much later literature is indebted to this novel - Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd & Tess of the D’Urbevilles, and EM Forster’s Howard’s End for starters - John Foyles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman in more recent times too. Tess is virtually a rerun of Adam Bede (with Tess like Hetty in AB a milkmaid by profession, ‘ruined’ by an upper class landlord ) - but it’s interesting that Tess almost ended Hardy’s career despite it being written almost 40 years later. Hardy’s rerun takes the issues raised by Adam Bede and recasts them in the most confrontational form possible.
It’s jaw-dropping that Eliot published this at the height of Victorian prudishness and performative morality - a tale of illicit sex, pregnancy outside marriage, and infanticide - and not only survived to tell the tale but was immediately catapulted into the premier league of Victorian novelists, with the book being hailed as a masterpiece across the board.
How did she do it? On my reading of Middlemarch and Adam Bede, Eliot had a genius for creative ambiguity on these live-wire issues. She knew exactly how far she could push her culture, and when and exactly how to defend from attack her controversial points.
She carefully soothes patriarchy’s sensitivities while simultaneously leaving the subversive questions she raises about patriarchy and class exploitation hanging in the air for the alert reader to consider.
2019 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Eliot.