Adam Bede

Adam Bede, novel written by George Eliot, published in three volumes in 1859. The title character, a carpenter, is in love with an unmarried woman who bears a child by another man. Although Bede tries to help her, he eventually loses her but finds happiness with someone else.

Adam Bede was Eliot’s first long novel. She described the work as “a country story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.” Its masterly realism—evident, for example, in the recording of Derbyshire dialect—brou...