num_pages: 563
description: The story of a beautiful country girl's seduction by the local squire and its bitter, tragic sequel is an old and familiar one which George Eliot invests with peculiar and haunting power.A bestseller from the moment of publication, Adam Bede, although on one level a rich and loving re-creation of a small community shaken to its core, is more than a charming, faultlessly evoked pastoral. However much the reader may sympathize with Hetty Sorrel and identify with Arthur Donnithorne, her seducer, and with Adam Bede, the man Hetty betrays, it is George Eliots's creation of the distant aesthetic whole - the complex, multifarious life of Hayslope - which so grips the reader's imagination. As Stephen Gill comments: 'Reading the novel is a process of learning simultaneously about the world of Adam Bede and the world of Adam Bede.'
language: English
title: Adam Bede
titlecomplete: Adam Bede
characters: Adam Bede, Dinah Morris, Arthur Donnithorne, Hetty Sorrel
genres: Literature, Classics, Novels, English Literature, Victorian, 19th Century, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance, British Literature
ratings_count: 25031
places: Hayslope
publisher: Penguin Classics