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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN num: 9780451529428
ISBN number: 0451529421
Label: Signet Classics
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 592
Printing Date: August 03, 2004
Publishing house: Signet Classics
Release Date: August 03, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 310701
Studio: Signet Classics
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Adam Bede is a hardy young carpenter who cares for his aging mother. His one weakness is the woman he loves blindly: the trifling town beauty, Hetty Sorrel, whose only delights are her baubles-and the delusion that the careless Captain Donnithorne may ask for her hand. Betrayed by their innocence, both Adam and Hetty allow their foolish hearts to trap them in a triangle of seduction, murder, and retribution.
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Rated by buyers 
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Anybody who had fallen deeply in love would be touched by the character of Adam Bede. George Eliot's fecund words are reminiscence of a very first kiss .... unforgettable.
Rated by buyers -
As the title indicates, I feel quite unqualified to review the writings of George Eliot. But I did like the edition that Penguin classics puts out. It's sturdy, held up well being hauled around (never go anywhere without a book). I thought the explanatory notes at the end were quite thorough, and I enjoyed the editor's introduction.
Rated by buyers 
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This is the very first book that I have read by George Eliot. I have serveral others of hers but I alway seemed to have another book I wanted to read. In fact, I started Adam Bede once and was about 150 pages into and put it down. After 6 months or so, I decided to pick it back up and I am glad that I did.
This is a wonderful story about a person who is true to himself and to those around him. This is also a story about how the actions of a person affect more than that person and those immediately involved.
The only problem I had with the story (and thus the 4 stars) was the dialect of the language used in the book. It is difficult to get used to the dialect and it is difficult to know what the character is trying to say. However, after the very first 200 pages, I did get the hang of it but it was difficult going at first. In fact, it was because of that difficulty that I put the book down before.
I was glad to have read this book. It does have a shocking part to it though it is subtle at first. What really helped me was to read several chapters and then go the the sparknotes and read them to make sure I had not missed anything which was a big help in fully understanding the story. I would recommend that if you read this book, read the sparknotes after every 4 or 5 chapters.
I would also recommend this book to anyone that likes Thomas Hardy and espcially his "Far from the Madding Crowd." I loved "Madding Crowd" and this book reminded me of it.
I truly recommend this book to anyone that likes English Classic Literature. Once you get the hang of the dialect you will like this story. If you read this one and have not read Thomas Hardy's "Madding Crowd" I would recommend that you read that one as well.
Rated by buyers -
When George Eliot published her very first novel ADAM BEDE in 1859, unknown to her reading public, she had just ushered in a new era of the English novel. Beginning with this novel, Eliot infused her novels with an overwhelming sense of determinism, a then popular philosophy that suggested that man's voyage through life, that when set by nature, society, or even by himself, was etched in stone. If literary characters were to pursue a course of action that was taken willingly, then that character had to live with the consequences, however unpleasant. The primary characters of the book, Adam himself, Arthur Donnithorne, and Hetty Sorrel, are seen as limited in their ability to avoid the ramifications of their actions.
Adam Bede is portrayed as the quintessential man of good. Indeed one of the problems that modern readers have with him is that in his goodness, he is essentially a flat character, whose goodness towards others and anger towards Donnithorne, all stem from that same well of virtue. Adam falls in love with the flighty and flirty Hetty Sorrel, and is prepared to marry her, until he catches her passionately embracing his childhood friend, the aristocratic Donnithorne. The two men fight, the consequences of which set in motion a sequence of events that do not allow for mitigation of circumstance. In Hetty Sorrel, Eliot has created a woman whom she seems to judge overly harshly. Hetty truly is a flirt, and a passionate one at that, but to subject her to a non-stop series of painful retributions merely because of Hetty's willingness to sleep with the object of her youthful dreams, Donnithorne, suggests that Eliot began the book with a deck stacked partially against Adam but totally against her. And then there is Donnithorne, one who is supposed to be the villain, yet he is far less the villain as Eliot tries mightily to portray him just as Adam is far less the understanding hero as Eliot tries just as mightily to depict him. As Adam and Donnithorne battle each other for possession of the fickle Hetty, the lovely preacher Dinah Morris has been patiently waiting for Adam to come to his senses and forget his infatuation with Hetty and recognize the virtuous treasure that Eliot wants the reader to see.
Readers yesterday show a marked lack of patience with Eliot's frequent narrative intrusions. Editors call such intrusions the use of omniscient narrator, a style of writing popular in Eliot's day but passé today. Yet, there are many readers who enjoy the panoramic vistas and linguistic idiosyncrasies that Eliot draws of a countryside that even in her day was fixed in the roots of an earlier 18th century cultural milieu. For those who do not mind Eliot's sometimes all too frequent helpful and sometimes unwanted comments, ADAM BEDE can be a welcome read in that it is a living reminder of how people may not escape the consequences of their actions, no matter how hard they try.
Rated by buyers -
I love Marion Evans and expect others would enjoy her very much too. I'm writing this review to make sure that, if Adam Bede is your very first experience with her, you not judge her by it and, if there is anything you find you like in it, that you go on and read more by her... Silas Marner, Middlemarch, essays, etc.
Adam Bede is, if I recall correctly, one of her earliest (if not first) extended works... the rest only get better. It is the only one that I would give less than five stars. There's really only one thing that mars it.
But first, what's good about it? Well, there's her deeply probing, psychological characterizations that leave all of her characters fully understood by the reader. We may love, admire, sympathize with, hope for, dislike, or disapprove of them. But we always understand them. Even the most minor characters or bit parts get well-developed. She puts more into a characterization of dogs than some writers do of humans... and it's clear that she loves them both very much!
Then there's her beautifully dense english: within a single sentence she can present a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. She has the most charitable way of using irony I've ever encountered. Also, she was very much to British vernacular what Mark Twain was to American vernacular. This is especially marked in Adam Bede and may lead some people to shy away from it.
Also, she takes on the big issues of her day... political and religious change, the position of women and the otherwise disenfranchised, etc... in a way and to an extent that no one else in her day was doing. It's somewhat stealthy at times, being cloaked in the lives of the individuals who are affected by the issues. Not infrequently her own views come, comically, from the mouths of those who must otherwise be taken to least likely represent them... very sly. An example from Middlemarch flows from the nontraditional Dorothea's very traditional sister: "Oh, women are better than men at most everything [Dorothea smiling in response and her sister catching herself]... excepting of course the things they're not I mean!". I think her writing definitely stands the test of time.
Now what's bad? One thing only... Adam Bede has one radical plot twist that's either physiologically impossible or relies on the unbelievable ignorance of most of the characters. I can only imagine that the twist was less perverse to the Victorian reader's sensibility but it left me cold near the end of an otherwise warm, engaging, moving work by a great writer.
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