Adam Bede
By George Eliot

It was that moment in summer when the sound of the scythe being whetted makes us cast more lingering looks at the flower-sprinked tresses of the meadows.

I found Adam Bede, George Eliot's first full length novel, extremely moving. Yes, perhaps a bit romantic and sentimental, but nevertheless, a strong emotional response. Some chapters were almost unbearably difficult to get through because of the strength of feeling it brought forth.

It is easy to begin reading and get wrapped up in the world of the small English village of Hayslope at the turn of the 19th Century. Eliot has such beautiful prose, the countryside and people come to life and you are swept away to "Loamshire", her fictional English county.

There is a lot of sympathy for the lot of the common workers she pictures in her books. She has sympathy but also a sharp eye and the world she describes is not always one of dappled sunlight and radiant meadow. People might be grey faced and pinched as well as rosy cheeked and dimpled. The story itself is a well known and time-worn one, as the author, publisher and reader knew: the central event is based on a story Eliot heard from her aunt when she was young. A squire falling for a farm girl was a tale commonly melodramatic but here made fresh, immediate and more realistic.

It is a slow book and infused with Christian thought and speech, with strong moral sentiment. There is also a huge amount of empathy, love, respect and humour; there are some very funny observations by Eliot (as an occasional narrator) and her characters. Mrs Poyser has a sharp and witty tongue, not sparing anyone, not her husband or even her landlord, the old squire. The scene where she gives him a piece of her mind when he tries to push her into an unwanted business arrangement is a real gem. When Hetty Sorrel, her beautiful but very vane niece, lets her imagination run and struts in front of her bedroom mirror "with a pigeon-like stateliness", we see it and laugh, but it also becomes heart-breaking later. I felt for Hetty even though Eliot does a lot to expose her vacuity, thoughtlessness and vanity.

The book is not without faults, Adam himself is perhaps a little too unblemished after all, but the novel is one of the greatest I've had the pleasure of reading.