Beyond Rivalry

My bookgroup is reading a tome this summer, George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), set at the turn of the 19th century in rural England. It was supposed to be, came assurances within the bookgroup, a shortish book, something apt for summer, but when I got it from the library, I found that it was almost 600-pages of onion-skin-thin paper with small print and narrow margins. I've been reading it off and on for a month -- it was too heavy to bring on the train when I went away for a week, and if I had managed to lug it along and to read it while lying on the beach, I would have blocked the sun from my person like an eclipse -- and though at times it has seemed interminable, I'm now less than 100 pages from the end.  And I quite like the book.

I'll be posting favourite passages for the next week or so.

Mr Irwine says to his elderly mother, about his invalid sister: "'But I must go up-stairs first and see Anne. I was called away to Tholer's funeral just when I was going before.'

 

"'It's of no use, child; she can't speak to you. Kate says she has one of her worst headaches this morning.'

 

"'O she likes me to go and see her just the same; she's never too ill to care about that.'

 

"If you know how much of human speech is mere purposeless impulse or habit, you will not wonder when I tell you that this identical objection had been made, and had received the same kind of answer, many hundreds of times in the course of the fifteen years that Mr Iwine's sister Anne had been an invalid. Splendid old ladies, who take a long time to dress in the morning, have often slight sympathy with sickly daughters."