kristinana 's review for:

Adam Bede by George Eliot

4.0

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I read this novel because someone told me it had opium use in it (for my dissertation), but I didn't find any. Oh, well -- it's still one more George Eliot read! This was very good, though it still doesn't touch Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss. Starts very slowly, but becomes quite gripping. The relationship between the vain Hetty and the saintlike Dinah seems like a kind of blueprint for the less extreme Rosamond and Dorothea. And the idea of a female preacher is really interesting. But what is especially impressive about this novel is that, like Eliot's other novels, she really makes you see a perspective and motive you otherwise don't get and helps you understand characters who would normally just be "bad" and thus given no inner life. You don't necessarily identify with such characters, but you can see their point of view, something that is rare in Victorian novelists (and even in contemporary ones, for that matter). To see such an extended representation of a seduced woman and especially of her seducer is highly unusual in the Victorian novels I've read. (For the seduced/fallen woman, there's Tess and Ruth, but not much else I can think of -- other fallen women are sometimes sympathetically portrayed but almost always othered -- we can pity them but must see them as very different from ourselves). The ending was disappointing (though very Victorian, so I wasn't really surprised, other than hoping for something different from Eliot). However, I'm more and more convinced (especially due to my dissertation work) that the ending is not at all the point. Overall, it was an enjoyable read.