In particular I failed to notice how Eliot in this book – just as in Middlemarch – considers the idea of vocation and how individuals can achieve a sense of fulfilment through work.Ī commitment to working hard is one of the chief differences between the ‘good’ characters in Adam Bede and those whose behaviour we are lead to despise.
Reading it now however it’s evident that in focusing so much on the doomed love triangle between Hetty, the carpenter Adam Bede and Captain Arthur Donnithorne, I overlooked many of the key themes of the novel. What I remember mostly is how sorry I felt for poor gullible Hetty Sorrel, a milkmaid who dreamed of love and a life beyond the drudgery of the cowshed and dairy only to be abandoned by the dastardly squire’s son. I first read Adam Bede more than 30 years ago. But you can see in Adam Bede, the novel she wrote some 14 years earlier, (it was in fact her first full length novel) her first steps towards the themes and approaches that will become prevalent in Middlemarch. To read it is to see Eliot’s creative imagination as its most mature. Yet it’s also a very human novel one that deals with ambition and the loneliness of failure whether in love or theological research or the desire to bring great benefit to mankind. This is a novel stuffed with big ideas, from Darwin’s natural selection to advances in medical sciences, from the Great Reform Act to industrialisation all organised within a central metaphor of “the web” of society.
It’s why I love George Eliot’s Middlemarch so much and why I never tire of going back to it. What distinguishes a truly great classic for me is that no-matter how many times I read it, I can still discover something fresh within its pages.
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