Staff Pick
Adam personifies goodness, but he's in love with the shallow, self-obsessed Hetty. She is only interested in the material luxuries that the egomaniacal Arthur can give her. This unfortunate love triangle leads to a tragedy none anticipate. Eliot has a perfect ear for dialect. Beautifully written and emotionally satisfying. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A remarkably vivid depiction of village life provides the backdrop to George Eliot’s first novel, a story of love and betrayal invested with social realism of unprecedented sensitivity.
Adam Bede is an upstanding young carpenter whose greatest weakness is his infatuation with the self-absorbed village beauty, Hetty Sorrel. Hetty has secretly set her sights on Captain Arthur Donnithorne, heir to the local squire’s estate; his abandonment of her and her engagement to Adam set in motion a tragedy that will touch many people’s lives. When Hetty lands in prison, accused of murder and facing a sentence of execution by hanging, it is her fervent young cousin Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher, whose intervention offers both Hetty and Adam comfort and the hope of peace.
The evocations of a lost rural world for which Adam Bede was so resoundingly praised on its publication in 1859 are charged in Eliot’s hands with a personal compassion that intensifies the novel’s outer dramas of seduction and betrayal and inner dramas of moral growth and redemption.
With an introduction by Leonee Ormond
Synopsis
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
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.
Synopsis
Eliot probes deeply into the psychology of commonplace people caught in the act of uncommon heroics. Alexandre Dumas called this novel 'the masterpiece of the century.'
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. xxii-xxiii).
About the Author
Leonee Ormond is Reader in English at King's College, University of London. She has published books on George du Maurier, Lord Leighton (with Richard Ormond) and J. M. Barrie.