Adam Bede

by George Eliot

I love George Eliot so much. Jane Austen has been my favorite author since childhood but Eliot has been giving her a run for her money for the past few years. Austen is still in the lead but not by much.

The reasons I love Eliot are because I love her characters, her dialogue, and her narrative voice, particularly her free indirect discourse. These are all things I also love about Austen but Eliot does them in slightly different ways and I can't even really put my finger on what, exactly, makes them different. Suffice to say that Eliot has her own voice and I love her for it. I particularly love the way she steps back every now and then and addresses the reader directly. It doesn't add to the story but it gives a feeling that there's a conversation going on between the reader and the author (remember, this was the day before every writer had a Twitter account). I loved this, if only because nobody does it anymore and I found it such a refreshing change of pace from what I've been reading lately (if I submitted a manuscript to an editor today that contained any passages like that, they would make me get rid of it so fast it would make my head spin).

I particularly appreciated Eliot's use of free indirect discourse to give us a look at a character suffering some serious cognitive dissonance. I loved it because this is a thing we all experience, to some extent, on a daily basis, even if we're not consciously aware of it. Giving us an inside look at this mental process makes it easy to understand the excuses the poor guy keeps making for his actions (think "I'll go on a diet tomorrow") but, at the same time, we can't feel too sorry for him when it all goes horribly wrong. He knew from the beginning that it couldn't end well and, just because we got to see that he struggled with the issue, doesn't absolve him of responsibility. I think the main lesson here is that it's not the thought that counts. Despite his actions, Arthur really did have the best intentions - but good intentions aren't enough to salvage the tragic consequences of his selfish actions and that's a lesson he has to learn the hard way.