Anamorphosis is a term from art history which refers to a drawing or painting so executed as to give a distorted image of the object represented but which, if viewed from a certain point, or reflected in a curved mirror, shows the object in true proportion. One of the best known examples in Britain is the distorted skull in Holbein's painting, The Ambassadors, in the National Gallery in London. It is a device which, I believe, can help us to understand some of the curious ambiguities of George Eliot's pastoral novel, Adam Bede, that most pictorial of her works over which there has been a good deal of critical dispute in recent years.

In one sense, the novel appears to be the most static and stable of all her fictions, with its descriptive set-pieces itemised in the chapter-headings: ‘The Workshop’, ‘The Preaching’, ‘The Rector’, ‘The Dairy’, ‘The Games’, ‘The Dance’, and so on. The perspective within which these locations and characters are described also seems reassuringly normative. But when it comes to matters of representation and interpretation, George Eliot's reassurances are often disingenuous. Her refusal, for example, to improve the facts of her story for the benefit of her more refined readers in chapter seventeen (‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’) is a characteristic trope: she will ‘give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in [her] mind’.