Abstract This study explores the relationship among female literacy, religious practice, and culture in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), a novel that represents women’s oratory as a means of abnegating one’s self through collective religious feeling. Adam Bede is bold, even revolutionary in its insistence that the dividing lines between the public world of men and the private world of women must be reviewed and redefined, and that denominational and official religious authority must be decentered and reexamined. Far more exciting, the novel incorporates a female reformer who challenges the doctrines and practices of the established Anglican Church and inaugurates her own ecclesiastical institution. Despite centuries of arguments, grounded in pre-Victorian injunctions, against female literacy, as well as the lack of recognition by the church hierarchy, women have nonetheless exercised spiritual leadership in their communities. The reverential, eucharistic woman reader who preaches in public, works to earn her bread, and transforms her life through reading (Dinah Morris) is placed, in Adam Bede, in sharp contrast to the ignorant milkmaid doubly handicapped by social position and illiteracy, and acts fatally on behalf of both (Hetty Sorrel).
Mădălina Elena Mandici (Sat,) studied this question.