¹⁹ No specific reference identifies the narrator’s gender, but the tone overall suggests a male voice, a fiction that George Eliot was eager to promote as a means of establishing authority and disguising the author’s gender at a time when reviews were often coloured by the fact of women’s authorship. For a discussion of Adam Bede as ‘the one fully achieved novel in which the masculine narrator is still an intact fiction,’ see Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 59–60.