Recommendations
Books Like Adam Bede
Best books to read after Adam Bede by George Eliot
Readers who love Adam Bede by George Eliot are drawn to its combination of the most fully realized English rural world in Victorian fiction, the tragedy of Hetty Sorrel's seduction and destruction, and the moral investigation of self-deception and its consequences. They want works that deal with the English Midlands pastoral tradition, the Victorian tragedy of seduction and infanticide, and the sympathetic investigation of working-class life that Eliot pioneered.
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
The companion — Maggie Tulliver's search for a life the world cannot give her. Both novels are set in the same English Midlands world and both are organized around a young woman who is destroyed by a social world that cannot accommodate her nature or forgive her transgression
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The companion masterpiece — Dorothea Brooke and Lydgate. The same Midlands provincial world at a more complex scale, with a richer philosophical investigation of the relationship between aspiration and the limits of what society can offer
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's companion tragedy — the beautiful country girl seduced and destroyed. Both Hetty Sorrel and Tess Durbeyfield are beautiful working-class girls destroyed by the sexual attention of a man above their class, and both novels are organized around the question of moral responsibility for the catastrophe
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Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's companion pastoral — Bathsheba Everdene in Dorset. The companion investigation of the same English agricultural world: both novels are set in specifically realized rural English communities and both are organized around a beautiful young woman and the men who love her
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Silas Marner
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion short novel — the miser Silas Marner and Eppie. The companion as the most concentrated version of the same Midlands world: written immediately after The Mill on the Floss, a parable of loss and recovery organized around the same community that Adam Bede inhabits
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The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's companion — Eustacia Vye and Clym Yeobright on Egdon Heath. The companion as the darker investigation of the same pastoral world: Eustacia Vye's desire for the wider world is the Dorset version of the same passionate woman destroyed by a provincial world that cannot contain her nature
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Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion last novel — Gwendolen Harleth's education out of egoism. The companion as Eliot's most ambitious and complex investigation of the same question: what happens when a beautiful, self-willed young woman encounters the consequences of her own choices?
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Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's companion final novel — Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead. The companion as the most radical and devastating version of the same investigation: the intelligent, passionate person destroyed by a social world that refuses to accommodate aspiration, and who understands the forces that destroy them without being able to escape them
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