Adam Bede

Paperback, 608 pages

English language

Published June 25, 1980 by Penguin Classics.

ISBN:
978-0-14-043121-6
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OCLC Number:
18632077

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(8 reviews)

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.

57 editions

reviewed Adam Bede by George Eliot (Everyman's library ;)

None

It's a love story.

It's set in the fictional English county of Loamshire at the end of the 18th century, which is some kind of rustic paradise until things start going wrong about halfway through the book. Unlike Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, whose romance novels are peopled with the landed gentry and their urban equivalents, this one is set among the yeoman class.

The book has been on our shelves forever, and I've been meaning to read it some day but kept putting it off, partly because of things I'd read about George Eliot, and partly because of plot summaries I'd read. Reading plot summaries can be a bad idea. It made it sound to simple, and a 600 page novel with such a simple plot must be boring, mustn't it, with all that padding?

But Eliot's descriptions of country life, though perhaps too idyllic, are part of the …

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