Mrs. Poyser is always pointed out as one of the more successful comic characters in modern English fiction. An extremely vital figure, she dominates most of the scenes in which she appears and constantly delights the reader with her wit and energy. Mrs. Poyser is a larger-than-life figure, more vivid and more colorful than most people or even most literary characters. She stands out, for example, even more clearly than Adam does, though her role in the novel is smaller. This quality derives partially from the fact that she is characterized more simply than Adam is; she possesses the clarity of a figure drawn in bold outlines with the distracting details left out.
But her vividness derives equally, if not more, from her dramatic and highly individual style of speaking. Mrs. Poyser rarely discusses anything calmly; she deals in exaggeration and oversimplification as a habit. For example, she informs Arthur that farming is "putting money into your pocket wi' your right hand and fetching it out wi' your left," and she announces Thias Bede's death to Hetty by saying "but Adam Bede and all his kin might be drownded for what you'd care."
Her most typical utterances are based upon similes drawn from nature and the domestic scene, and this imagery reinforces her characteristic exaggerations: "As I say to Poyser, [looking at Mr. Irwine] is like looking at a full crop o' wheat, or a pasture with a fine dairy o' cows in it; it makes you think the world's comfortable-like. But as for such creatures as you Methodisses run after, I'd as soon go to look at a lot o' bare-ribbed runts [for example, cattle] on a common."
Like Lisbeth, Mrs. Poyser functions to a great extent as a background character; she plays no great part in the development of the plot. But she is nevertheless a very real figure, and the student interested in the creation of character in fiction can learn a great deal by analyzing the mood changes, the sentiments, and especially the speech patterns of the redoubtable Mrs. Poyser.
