Adam Bede (1859)

By George Eliot

590pp, Fiction

Rating:3/5

Notes

2025-08-05

Interesting to compare this to Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth. A lot of similar themes (church stuff, dissenters vs establishment etc.) as well as the central plot point of a lower-class woman scandalously made pregnant out of wedlock by her social "superior". TBH I preferred Ruth, just more dynamic, and Gaskell has more sympathy with Ruth (though on the flip side Ruth's own agency is diminished or at least elided by Gaskell's treatment) than Eliot manages for Hetty Sorell. Dinah seems like the kind of ideal female character that Henry James would complain Dorothea from Middlemarch failed to live up to.

All text and photographs are © Tom Pearson 2009-2025 unless otherwise noted.

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