Mrs Bennett finds in George Eliot's work the beginnings of certain modern developments of the novel, notably her respect for unity of design, her interest in the complexity of human personality and experience and beneath a contemporary naturalism, a feeling towards symbolic presentation. Indeed, she turns into a typical housewife by the end of the novel, even consenting to discontinue her preaching because the Methodist men have decided against it.Description Product filter button Description Her resistance to marriage, because she worries it would curtail her religious teaching, is resolved by Eliot in a manner calculated not to upset the male hierarchy: Dinah was not in fact kept from a traditional marriage by piety, but because no man she truly loved had yet asked her to marry him.

In fact, she is sometimes considered to be Eliot's most confident female character.Īccording to Diana Neill, 'The plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child-murder, made to her by a girl in prison.' ĭinah's preaching is extremely effective, persuading the exceptionally vain Bess to take off her gaudy earrings - though only briefly. Though she is an attractive woman, she seems to show no signs of self-consciousness while she preaches. When Hetty commits her crime and cannot own up to it, Dinah's presence allows Hetty to face what she has done and ask for forgiveness.Īt the beginning of the novel, Dinah lives at the Poyser farm because she is Mrs.

She offers to help Hetty if she is ever in need. She lives to comfort others, including Adam Bede's mother when her husband is drowned. Rachel Poyser, her aunt, wishes Dinah would stay with them in Hayslope.ĭinah is deeply religious, a follower of Wesleyan Methodism. She is a cousin by marriage of Hetty Sorrel and related to the Poysers. She says to Lisbeth Bede in Chapter Ten, 'I work in the cotton-mill when I am at home.' She lives thirty miles away in the fictional Snowfield, in the fictional Stonyshire County. Dinah Morris is a major character in George Eliot's novel Adam Bede (1859) a Methodist lay preacher, she was modelled on Eliot's aunt Elizabeth Evans.ĭinah visits the fictional community of Hayslope - a rural, pastoral and close-knit community in 1799.

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