Closet addiction in fiction: the search for Christiana Evans

Mary Ann Evans, who would later become the great nineteenth-century novelist George Eliot, takes up in her first three works of fiction a discussion of the use of alcohol in her own culture. However, it is in "Adam Bede" (1859) that a significant portion of the discussion (the alcoholism of one female character in particular) is so deliberately closeted -- so backgrounded -- that the structure of the text becomes a slippery portrait, not only of the extent to which the culturally pervasive alcoholism of women was persistently denied, but of Eliot's own mother's hidden substance abuse. An important minor character in "Adam Bede," identified by more than one biographer as having a kinship to Eliot's mother Christiana Evans, shows all the signs and symptoms of alcoholism, a phenomenon which even the story's narrator appears to be hiding from the reader.