Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0192834959, Paperback)

In Adam Bede (1859) George Eliot took the well-worn tale of a lovely dairy-maid seduced by a careless squire, and out of it created a wonderfully innovative and sympathetic portrait of the lives of ordinary Midlands working people - their labours and loves, their beliefs, their talk. Hugely popular in its own time, Adam Bede is one of the greatest examples of humane and liberal Victorian social concern, a pioneering classic of radical social realism. It is also important for the way it meditates on the need for such fiction and the methods of writing it. As the Introduction declares: `The distinction of Adam Bede is to tell a story, and also to tell about telling a story. This is a novel about obscure lives, and also about how to be a novel about obscure lives.' This edition reprints the original broadsheet reports of the murder case that was a starting point for the book, and the notes illuminate Eliot's many literary and religious references.

Amazon.com Download Description (ISBN 0192834959, Paperback)

George Eliot takes the well-worn tale of a lovely dairy-maid seduced by a careless squire, and out if it creates a portrait of the lives of ordinary Midlands working people -- their labors and loves, their beliefs, their speech.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0451525272, Paperback)

A Phoenix Recording

In the novel that Alexandre Dumas called "the masterpiece of the century," three unworldly people find themselves trapped by unwise love in the English midlands of the early 1800s.

Adam Bede, a simple carpenter, loves too blindly; Hetty Sorrel, a coquettish beauty, too recklessly; Arthur Donnithorne, a dashing squire, too carelessly. Their innocence, vanity and imprudence lead them into a triangle of seduction, murder and retribution.

"Eliot's growing number of fans will feast on her first full-length novel, which probes the uncommon heroics of commonplace people." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0375759018, Paperback)

Hailed for its sympathetic and accurate rendering of nineteenth-century English pastoral life, Adam Bede was George Eliot’s first full-length novel and a bestseller from the moment of publication. Eliot herself called it “a country story—full of the breath of cows and scent of hay.” Adam Bede is an earnest and virtuous carpenter who is betrayed by his love, Hetty Sorrel, a pretty yet foolish dairymaid who is seduced by a careless young villager. The bitter, tragic consequences of her actions shake the very foundations of their serene rural community.

While Adam Bede represents a timeless story of seduction and betrayal, it is also a deeper, impassioned meditation on the irrevocable consequences of human actions and on moral growth and redemption through suffering.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0451529421, Paperback)

Adam Bede is a hardy young carpenter who cares for his aging mother. His one weakness is the woman he loves blindly: the trifling town beauty, Hetty Sorrel, whose only delights are her baubles-and the delusion that the careless Captain Donnithorne may ask for her hand. Betrayed by their innocence, both Adam and Hetty allow their foolish hearts to trap them in a triangle of seduction, murder, and retribution.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0679409912, Hardcover)

The exhilaration that comes from reading Adam Bede Owes its existence to the fact that on every page George Eliot seems absorbed in the process of spiritual discovery. The evocations of bygone rural life for which Adam Bede was so resoundingly praised on its publication in 1859 are charged with a personal passion that intensifies the novel's outer dramas of seduction and betrayal, and inner dramas of moral growth and redemption.

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 1853261920, Paperback)

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts University of Kent at Canterbury 'Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your immediate feelings...' Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot's first full-length novel, marked the emergence of an artist to rank with Scott and Dickens. Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eighteenth century, the book relates a story of seduction issuing in 'the inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis'. But it is also a rich and pioneering record - drawing on intimate knowledge and affectionate memory - of a rural world that we have lost. The movement of the narration between social realism and reflection on its own processes, the exploration of motives, and the constant authorial presence all bespeak an art that strives to connect the fictional with the actual.