Dinah Morris

She lives to comfort others, including Adam Bede's mother when her husband is drowned.

According to Diana Neill, "The plot [of Adam Bede] is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child-murder, made to her by a girl in prison.

"[2] Dinah's preaching is extremely effective, persuading the exceptionally vain Bess to take off her gaudy earrings -- though only briefly.

Her resistance to marriage, because she worries it would curtail her religious teaching, is resolved by Eliot in a manner calculated not to upset the male hierarchy:[3] Dinah was not in fact kept from a traditional marriage by piety, but because no man she truly loved had yet asked her to marry him.

Indeed, she turns into a typical housewife by the end of the novel, even consenting to discontinue her preaching because the Methodist men have decided against it.