Buy it from Amazon
FYI, these are sometimes referral links!
| First Written | 1859 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | UK |
| Publisher | Librivox |
| My Copy | librivox audiobook |
| First Read | May 20, 2025 |
Adam Bede
George Eliot is such a complicated-feeling author, especially reading her and knowing that she's writing at the same time as Dickens et al. She's got this huge depth of understanding for her characters, and it's so skeptical and just-right-on-the-edge of bitter. Doubly so when she writes women, which I suppose is not surprising. But yeah, I should talk with people that have read more of her stuff.
Noted on May 20, 2025
Just described a table that has never been oiled with anything artificial but yet shines with ‘elbow polish’
Noted on May 20, 2025
Ch 2 - The young methodist preacher shows up, and at first I was like ‘oh fun, I go to a Wesleyan church now, it’s interesting to hear this come up in real literature.’ And then the preacher, Dinah, goes and delivers the first half of a BANGER of a sermon, just a great, clear, ‘this is what the gospel means’. Surprising!
Noted on May 20, 2025
OK, this is my third George Eliot book, I think, and I don't know why it took me so long to come around to her. She's great (obviously), which is kind of my theme of reading the classics as an adult. But it's interesting, funny, and oh gosh, I loved the intro to book 2, where Eliot spends some time addressing the reader and laying out a theory of aesthetics in the novel. I just made that sound boring, but it’s really quite charming.
Noted on May 20, 2025
Chapter XVII
In Which the Story Pauses a Little
“This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!” I hear one of my readers exclaim. “How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things—quite as good as reading a sermon.”
Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.
Quoted on May 20, 2025
You must make it quite clear to your mind which you are most bent upon, old boy—popularity or usefulness—else you may happen to miss both.
Quoted on May 20, 2025
It was very much in this way that our friend Adam Bede thought about Hetty; only he put his thoughts into different words. If ever she behaved with cold vanity towards him, he said to himself it is only because she doesn’t love me well enough; and he was sure that her love, whenever she gave it, would be the most precious thing a man could possess on earth. Before you despise Adam as deficient in penetration, pray ask yourself if you were ever predisposed to believe evil of any pretty woman—if you ever could, without hard head-breaking demonstration, believe evil of the one supremely pretty woman who has bewitched you. No: people who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.
Quoted on May 20, 2025
Folks must put up wi’ their own kin, as they put up wi’ their own noses.
Quoted on May 20, 2025