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Adam Bede, a carpenter, loves Hetty Sorrel. Hetty is the parish beauty, living with her aunt and uncle who hope to get her married to a respectable young man. Hetty loves Arthur Donnithorne and is under the illusion that he'll ask her to marry him - elevating her status and providing her with the life of luxury she dreams of. These three allow their foolishness to trap them into a triangle.
Adam Bede isn't George Eliot's best work, but it's still pretty amazing. Eliot's powers of psychological insight are unparalleled. Here she's given us an accurate description of the time that was 60 years prior to her time. She's got this pastoral novel filled with scenes of laborers and farmers, religion and class tied up into this story that involves sex and murder. She also has much to say on marriage and love (even if some of it is facetious):
Of course, I know that, as a rule, sensible men fall in love with the most sensible women of their acquaintance, see through all the pretty deceits of coquettish beauty, never imagine themselves loved when they are not loved, cease loving on all proper occasions, and marry the woman most fitted for them in every respect. . . . But even to this rule an exception will occur now and then in the lapse of centuries, and my friend Adam was one.
Adam Bede made it known that George Eliot was a novelist. The story takes some time and you will have to invest yourself in it, but it's easy to do with writing as lovely as this:
Not a word more was spoken as they gathered the currants. Adam's heart was too full to speak, and he thought Hetty knew all that was in it. She was not indifferent to his presence after all; she had blushed when she saw him, and then there was that touch of sadness about her which must surely mean love, since it was the opposite of her usual manner, which had impressed him as indifference. And he could glance at her continually as she bent over the fruit, while the level evening sunbeams stole through the thick apple-tree boughs, and rested on her round cheek and neck as if they too were in love with her. It was to Adam the time that a man can least forget in after-life, the time when he believes that the first woman he has ever loved betrays him by a slight something - a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or eyelid - that she is at least beginning to love him in return. The sign is so slight, it is scarcely perceptible to the ear or eye - he could describe it no one - it is a mere feather-touch, yet it seems to have changed his whole being, to have merged an uneasy yearning into delicious unconciousness of everything but the present moment. So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood. But the first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odour breathed in a far-off hour of happiness, it is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy and adds the last keenness to despair. (p.229-230)
Adam Bede isn't George Eliot's best work, but it's still pretty amazing. Eliot's powers of psychological insight are unparalleled. Here she's given us an accurate description of the time that was 60 years prior to her time. She's got this pastoral novel filled with scenes of laborers and farmers, religion and class tied up into this story that involves sex and murder. She also has much to say on marriage and love (even if some of it is facetious):
Of course, I know that, as a rule, sensible men fall in love with the most sensible women of their acquaintance, see through all the pretty deceits of coquettish beauty, never imagine themselves loved when they are not loved, cease loving on all proper occasions, and marry the woman most fitted for them in every respect. . . . But even to this rule an exception will occur now and then in the lapse of centuries, and my friend Adam was one.
Adam Bede made it known that George Eliot was a novelist. The story takes some time and you will have to invest yourself in it, but it's easy to do with writing as lovely as this:
Not a word more was spoken as they gathered the currants. Adam's heart was too full to speak, and he thought Hetty knew all that was in it. She was not indifferent to his presence after all; she had blushed when she saw him, and then there was that touch of sadness about her which must surely mean love, since it was the opposite of her usual manner, which had impressed him as indifference. And he could glance at her continually as she bent over the fruit, while the level evening sunbeams stole through the thick apple-tree boughs, and rested on her round cheek and neck as if they too were in love with her. It was to Adam the time that a man can least forget in after-life, the time when he believes that the first woman he has ever loved betrays him by a slight something - a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or eyelid - that she is at least beginning to love him in return. The sign is so slight, it is scarcely perceptible to the ear or eye - he could describe it no one - it is a mere feather-touch, yet it seems to have changed his whole being, to have merged an uneasy yearning into delicious unconciousness of everything but the present moment. So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood. But the first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odour breathed in a far-off hour of happiness, it is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy and adds the last keenness to despair. (p.229-230)