Adam Bede

In Adam Bede (1859) George Eliot took the well-worn tale of a lovely dairy-maid seduced by a careless squire, and out if it created a wonderfully innovative and sympathetic portrait of the lives of ordinary Midlands working people–their labors and loves, their beliefs, their talk. Thisedition reprints the original broadsheet reports of the murder case that was a starting point for the book, and detailed notes illuminate Eliot’s many literary and Biblical allusions.