A remarkably vivid depiction of village life provides the backdrop to George Eliot's first novel--a breathtaking story of love and betrayal invested with social realism of unprecedented sensitivity is presented here in a beautiful hardcover edition, with an introduction by Leonee Ormond.

Adam Bede is an upstanding young carpenter whose greatest weakness is his infatuation with the self-absorbed village beauty, Hetty Sorrel. Hetty has secretly set her sights on Captain Arthur Donnithorne, heir to the local squire's estate; his abandonment of her and her engagement to Adam set in motion a tragedy that will touch many people's lives. When Hetty lands in prison, accused of murder and facing a sentence of execution by hanging, it is her fervent young cousin Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher, whose intervention offers both Hetty and Adam comfort and the hope of peace.

The evocations of a lost rural world for which Adam Bede was so resoundingly praised on its publication in 1859 are charged in Eliot's hands with a personal compassion that intensifies the novel's outer dramas of seduction and betrayal and inner dramas of moral growth and redemption.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a jacket. Everyman's Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.