So do yourself a favor and immerse yourself in the world of George Eliot. She makes Jane Eyre's emotional depth seem like Patrick Bateman's. Eliot makes Charles Dickens's complex characters seem as simplistic as Dick and Jane. We get to see the aftershocks reverberate throughout the townsfolk, and George Eliot goes deep into the minds of basically everyone in town with the cunning of a superspy and the psychological know-how of Freud. The community of Hayslope's socks are rocked by the (seriously sordid) love triangle action going on in their sleepy little hamlet. But Adam Bede, published a decade earlier in 1859, could totally have been titled Hayslope. George Eliot's most famous book, Middlemarch(which literary heavyweight Martin Amis calls ' the central English novel'-no biggie) is easily identified as a novel about the community of Middlemarch-it's right there in the title. To call Adam Bede 'that love triangle book' is like calling Moby-Dick 'that whale book' or calling Citizen Kane 'that newspaper movie' or calling The Wire'that cop show.' Oh, and drunks drowned in creeks, secret pregnancy, and murder.īasically, the love triangle is the skeleton of Adam Bede-it's what holds the plot together, but it's by no means the only thing going on. No: Adam Bede exists in three dimensions-it's a book about a love triangle, the dawn of a new century, the church, the class system, the role of women, and education. It's not even just a love rectangle, or dodecahedron. Our titular hero Adam Bede has a thing for a pretty little dairymaid, who has a thing for an aristocratic dude, who has a thing for… knockin' boots with pretty little dairymaids.īut this novel isn't just a simple love triangle.

Love triangles: nobody likes being stuck in them, but everybody likes reading about them.īut even as the love-triangulators of the world stay up late at night, crying (or making Voodoo dolls of their rivals), we're glued to the pages of any book that contains an especially gory love triangle… whether it's between a human, a vampire, and a werewolf on the Olympic Peninsula or three normal ol' humans in Hayslope, England circa 1799.

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