Description
There is a homely quality about Adam Bede, and in Walter Allen's judgment it is, apart from Far From the Madding Crowd, the finest pastoral novel in English. The scenes set in Mrs Poyser's farmhouse, in the rectory and at the harvest supper have been styled 'Dutch interiors'. These spheres of human activity are not independent of each other as they are with many novelists. They are magnificently integrated and display the sound construction which George Eliot brought to her books, containing an 'inner circle (a small group of individuals involved in a moral dilemma) surrounded by an outer circle (the solid world in which the dilemma is resolved)".
Full moral responsibility for our actions and their consequences, sometimes 'terrible consequences-consequences hardly ever confined to ourselves that is the heart of Adam Bede. We see the fall of Hetty Sorrel, her seduction by Arthur Donnithorne, the misery of Adam Bede that followed and his marriage with Dinah Morris. Like life itself, the undertones of the novel are tragic, but what will surprise readers new to the book, as it surprised those of the novelist's own time, is the rare, high humour that accompanies the excitement of the drama.
ISBN:0460010271
