Adam Bede (Penguin Classics)

by George Eliot (Author), Margaret Reynolds (Editor), George Eliot (Author), Margaret Reynolds (Editor), George Eliot (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $4.19

  Carpenter Adam Bede is in love with the beautiful Hetty Sorrel, but unknown to him, he has a rival, in the local squire's son Arthur Donnithorne. Hetty is soon attracted by Arthur's seductive charm and they begin to meet in secret. The relationship is to have tragic consequences that reach far beyond the couple themselves, touching not just Adam Bede, but many others, not least, pious Methodist Preacher Dinah Morris. A tale of seduction, betrayal, love and deception, the plot of Adam Bede has the quality of an English folk song. Within the setting of Hayslope, a small, rural community, Eliot brilliantly creates a sense of earthy reality, making the landscape itself as vital a presence in the novel as that of her characters themselves.

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.25

  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.

• New

  Paperback
  1997

  $7.06

  With an Introduction by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, 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.

• New

  Hardcover
  1992

  $13.40

  A story which evokes a bygone rural life, and is charged with a personal passion that intensifies the novel's outer dramas of seduction and betrayal and inner dramas of moral growth and redemption.