Adam Bede

The exhilaration that comes from reading Adam Bede owes its existence to the fact that on every page George Eliot seems absorbed in the process of spiritual discovery. The evocations of bygone rural life for which Adam Bede was so resoundingly praised on its publication in 1859 are charged with a personal passion that intensifies the novel’s outer dramas of seduction and betrayal, and inner dramas of moral growth and redemption.