Book description
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.
Mary Ann (Marian) Evans was born in 1819 in Warwickshire. Under the
name of George Eliot, she wrote Scenes of Clerical Life,
Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner,
Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and
Daniel Deronda, as well as numerous essays, articles and
reviews. She died in 1880, only a few months after marrying J. W.
Cross, an old friend and admirer, who became her first biographer.
Margaret Reynolds works on literature from the C18th to the present
day, especially poetry, and especially in the Victorian period. Her
The Sappho History (2003) traced the transmission of the
works and images of the ancient Greek poet as they appear in the works
of Mary Robinson, S. T. Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, Baudelaire,
Swinburne, H. D. and Virginia Woolf. Margaret Reynolds is the
presenter of BBC Radio 4's 'Adventures in Poetry', now in its 11th
series. She has a weekly column on classic books in the Saturday
Times .
