Adam Bede

George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) is a richly observed realist novel set in the rural Midlands at the close of the eighteenth century. It traces the intersecting lives of the upright carpenter Adam Bede, the vain and impulsive Hetty Sorrel, the fervent Methodist preacher Dinah Morris, and the squire's grandson Arthur Donnithorne. Eliot combines moral seriousness with minute social observation, rendering village labor, religious feeling, and erotic desire with unusual psychological depth. As an ea ...