George Eliot Early Novels

About Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859) was George Eliot's debut novel — published under her male pseudonym — and the book that immediately established her as a major Victorian novelist. Set in a Midlands village at the end of the eighteenth century, it tells the story of a virtuous country carpenter, a Methodist preacher, and the tragedy born of a young squire's seduction of a beautiful dairymaid. The novel's combination of moral seriousness, pastoral landscape, and psychological depth introduced the world Eliot would explore through all her subsequent fiction.