The 2023 George Eliot Chapter-a-Day Read-along begins in just two days with Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede. Mary Ann Evans wrote Adam Bede when she was close to 40 years old. She had already been fairly successful as a non-fiction writer, translator, and editor up to that time, but she had resolved to become a novelist. Her first published fiction in book form was a set of three short stories collected in Scenes of Clerical Life. This was also the first time Evans used George Eliot as a pseudonym:

“She also adopted a nom-de-plume, George Eliot….Although female authors were published under their own names during her lifetime, she wanted to escape the stereotype of women’s writing being limited to lighthearted romances or other lighter fare not to be taken very seriously. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as a translator, editor, and critic.” (Wikipedia)

Adam Bede was published in February of 1859, a year which also saw the publication of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. In July of 1859 George Eliot anonymously published The Lifted Veil, a novella that is supposedly quite unlike her realistic fiction. The Lifted Veil is included in the second volume of the vintage edition of Adam Bede that I will be reading, and I hope to read it after we finish Adam Bede, especially since it has been described as “a significant part of the Victorian tradition of horror fiction, which includes such other examples as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

Of the six books we are going to read this year, Adam Bede is one of three I have not read, the other two being Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. I have no knowledge of the story or setting of Adam Bede, and really only know it from seeing it on lists of classics. That means I am going into it fresh, reading it for the first time.

Good luck with your own reading of Adam Bede, and feel free to come back to this post and comment on your reactions to the book. Remember that I will be posting a quote each day on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #eliotreadalong and I’m even going to experiment with posting on Instagram as well!