It is in these chapters that the author gives a documentary record of the rural way of life of the period. Towards the end of the novel their relationship blossoms.Īnd bears out Eliot’s maxim that ‘our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.’ However, the tone of the narrative is lightened by the pastoral mood in its early sections which capture the beauty and gentle serenity of country living.

Dinah is a great comfort to Adam and helps him to track down Hetty. Helping Adam to cope with his distress is Hetty’s friend, the gentle Dinah Morris, a lay preacher whose self-appointed mission in life is saving souls.

He is ignorant of this and so Hetty sets out in harsh weather to search for him, hoping that they can be reunited. Reluctantly Hetty agrees to marry Adam in the spring to make the best of a bad bargain, but as the wedding day approaches her pregnancy can no longer be concealed. Conscience stricken at stealing his best friend’s girl, Arthur writes a farewell letter to Hetty and goes off to join his regiment.

When Adam finds out, he feels betrayed and challenges Arthur to a fistfight. As Hetty’s fondest dream is to become the lady of the manor she encourages Arthur, who succeeds in seducing her. While Adam has great difficulty expressing his feelings towards Hetty, his best friend Arthur Donnithorpe, ignorant of Adam’s feelings, is also attracted to her. Eliot also used her own experiences of being brought up on a farm to add a detailed authentic reality to the narrative and based the character of Adam on her own father.Įssentially the story is a dark love tangle.Īdam Bede, a young carpenter, is in love with Hetty Sorrel, a pretty but empty-headed girl. The story, set in the Midlands, involved a confession made to the aunt of a child’s murder by a girl in prison. The novel is set in the late 18th century and the author described it as ‘A country story full of the breath of cow and scent of hay.’Īccording to the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1967), ‘the plot is founded upon a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher who was the model for the character Dinah Morris in the novel’. She used a male soubriquet in order that her fiction was judged separately from her other writings and, more particularly, she wanted to escape the belief that all women’s fiction was limited to lighted-hearted romances. George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) who was known as a journalist, poet and translator before she wrote Adam Bede (1859), the first of her seven novels. That is what I undertake for you, reader.’ ‘With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. Published in 1859, Adam Bede was the first novel by Mary Ann Evans, written under her pen name George Eliot.

Adam Bede by George Eliot