Publisher, Blackstone Audio (July 1999)

“The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos of those stories, I have never seen the like of." --Charles Dickens

It was her second book, Adam Bede, which secured George Eliot’s reputation as an author; but in this, her first work, she had already demonstrated her remarkable gifts for writing and produced a form of fiction that ran counter to the debates regarding religion in her day. Eliot had parted ways with Christian faith over a decade before writing Scenes of Clerical Life in 1857, becoming one of many Victorian era “Honest Doubters.” Yet her mature views, never simple ones, shine through in this work. Under the surface orthodoxy of the Scenes are signs of her search for a “religion of Humanity,” and her desire for conciliation with whatever was best in Christianity.