Adam Bede

George Eliot’s first novel brings rural labor, moral consequence, and intimate human conflict into a broad, patient work of Victorian realism.

At a glance Adam Bede is George Eliot’s first novel and already unmistakably her own: morally… Set in a rural Midlands community at the turn of the nineteenth century, it follows… Why read Adam Bede today? Eliot’s realism feels expansive rather than merely documentary.

What kind of classic is it?

About this book In a rural English community, love, vanity, labor, and religious feeling converge in a story of moral failure and painful consequence.