Over at The Valve, they are reading George Eliot's Adam Bede. It's an open discussion forum, and will continue for several weeks, with readings paced reasonably throughout. This is the first week of discussion, with commentary centering on the first several chapters. If you have a little bit of free time--or a willingness to make same--check it out and take part.

George Eliot is one of my absolute favorites. She's a bit of an acquired taste--her prose can be a bit heavy at times--but she's well worth the effort. She came to the novel during the 1850s circuitously--from a rural, evangelical, intensely autodidactic childhood to a brief career in London as a behind-the-scenes everyman for the Westminster Review to a tortuous affair with Herbert Spencer and a spectacularly happy but socially damaging elopement with the married George Henry Lewes.

Mary Ann Evans could read numerous languages and talk knowledgeably about science, philosophy, history, religion, and just about anything else; she translated Spinoza, Strauss, and Feuerbach; and she had a strong, evolving sense of the novel as a genre with great artistic and social potential--and of novelists as continually falling short of realizing that potential. She sharpened her sense of realist fiction as an under-realized form throughout the 1850s with essays on the silly novels written by lady novelists and on the special capacity of fiction to "extend our sympathies" outward, to lives and outlooks and experiences far beyond our own. She saw Dickens in particular has having squandered a great chance to make a real difference in a newly urban, terrifically divided industrial world--because he failed to draw his working-class characters believably, opting instead for charming caricature.

And, at Lewes' prodding, she eventually undertook storytelling on her own, with a series of novellas about the recent rural past, Scenes of Clerical Life. Published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine under the pseudonym "George Eliot," they were an immediate sensation, admired by Dickens (who realized the writer was a woman) and even appropriated by a clergyman who seized his fifteen minutes by claiming to have been their author.

Adam Bede followed shortly thereafter; it is Eliot's first novel, and it represents her first full-length effort to devise a narrative style that would realize the novel's capacity to enlarge readers' empathic powers by giving them compelling characters vastly unlike themselves. Hence the thick regional dialect, the remote historical setting, and the focus on rural, evangelical characters far removed from the personalities of the mid-Victorian novel-reading classes.

This is necessarily a brief and partial introduction to an important novel by a great author (Virginia Woolf once observed that Eliot's finest work, Middlemarch, was "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people"). But hopefully it's enough to tempt you to read some Eliot in the coming weeks.