3 Review(s)

In "Adam Bede" (1859) George Eliot took the well-worn tale of a lovely dairy-maid seduced by a careless squire, and out of it created an innovative and sympathetic portrait of the lives of ordinary Midlands working people - their labours and loves, their beliefs, their talk. This edition reprints the original broadsheet reports of the murder case that was a starting point for the book, and the notes illuminate Eliot's many literary and religious references.