Adam Bede

Adam Bede opens with George Eliot's own justification for what she is about to do — hold up "a single drop of ink" as a mirror to Hayslope, a village that never existed, and the people in it, who did, more or less. Adam is a carpenter too honest and too capable to see what is happening in front of him: Hetty Sorrel, the dairy farmer's niece, vain and lovely and seventeen, has caught the eye of Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who will inherit everything and answer for nothing. What follows — a secret, an abandonment, a walk across three counties to find a man who has already forgotten her — is drawn, Eliot said afterward, from a story her aunt told her: a Methodist preacher who sat all night with a girl condemned to hang for the murder of her own child.

Eliot's first novel, published under a name that was not her own. A Warwickshire man let it be believed he had written it; the Liggins affair ran through most of 1859 before Eliot confirmed the truth that July. Adam Bede itself appeared complete, in three volumes, from William Blackwood and Sons on 1 February 1859.

Bibliomancer restores the 1859 text exactly as Eliot wrote it.