Adam Bede
by George Eliot
Summary
Adam Bede is a carpenter of twenty six in the fictional village of Hayslope in 1799, steady, skilled, and in love with Hetty Sorrel, a farmer's niece whose vanity and beauty draw her instead toward Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire's grandson and heir to the local estate. Arthur seduces Hetty knowing perfectly well the difference in their stations makes any future together impossible, and when he finally breaks it off and leaves for his militia posting, Hetty discovers she is pregnant and sets out alone to find him, wandering the countryside in a state the novel renders with real dread rather than melodrama. She gives birth in secret, abandons the infant in a field, and is arrested and tried for its death; only a desperate last minute ride by Arthur, returning in time to secure a reprieve, saves her from hanging, though not from transportation. Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin and a Methodist preacher who has spent the novel offering a plain, unglamorous kind of moral seriousness, visits Hetty in prison and sits with her through the worst of it, and it is Dinah, not Hetty, whom Adam eventually marries, the two of them building something quieter and more durable out of the wreckage Arthur left behind.
Eliot writes the Hayslope countryside and its people with an eye for exact, unsentimental detail, and the novel is less interested in punishing Hetty than in tracing, patiently, how ordinary vanity and ordinary carelessness produce genuine catastrophe. The pace is unhurried and the moral attention relentless, closer to a study of consequence than a romance, and a reader coming for plot alone may find the middle chapters slow; a reader willing to sit with Eliot's patience will find the trial and its aftermath genuinely harrowing.
Eliot based the core of the story on an account her aunt, herself a Methodist preacher, once gave her of sitting through the night with a girl condemned for killing her infant.
Historical Context & Significance
Published on 1 February 1859 by John Blackwood as George Eliot's first full novel, Adam Bede appeared under a pseudonym that hid the fact that its author was Mary Ann Evans, already known in London literary circles as an editor and translator. The Times called it "a first rate novel," and Charles Dickens wrote to her that "the whole country life... is so real, and so droll and genuine... I cannot praise it enough." Anne Mozley was among the first reviewers to guess, correctly, that the author was a woman.
The novel has stayed in print continuously since and is a standard text in university courses on Victorian fiction, valued for its unusually clear eyed treatment of seduction, class, and the limits of religious forgiveness. It has been adapted for the stage, for silent film in 1918, and for television as recently as 1991.