Product Description

The Clarendon edition of Adam Bede (1859) is the first critical edition of the work that established George Eliot's reputation. Its extensive textual apparatus lists manuscript and first edition variants from the copy-text, which is the corrected eighth edition of 1861 -- her last revision of the book. The introduction locates the genesis of the novel in Eliot's family history, her travels, and her reading of literature and biography, and describes the composition process, including her debate with the publisher John Blackwood about the suitability of the subject-matter for a family audience, as both author and publisher anticipated its appearing initially in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Using Blackwood's publication ledgers, it also establishes the details of the eleven complete or nearly complete resettings of the novel in Eliot's lifetime; and examines the author's revisions to a manuscript that is popularly, but erroneously, thought to have been little altered, giving detailed attention to the dialect in the context of more than 900 variants between manuscript and first edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #278572 in Books
• Published on: 1980-03-27
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Choice
"Superb scholarly edition of Eliot's Adam Bede ... An indispensable purchase for all academic libraries and large public libraries"

Synopsis
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.

About the Author
Dr Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is author of British Writers of the Thirties (OUP).

Customer Reviews

touching book that will stay with you a while after you read it
this is my 2nd fav book of all time...the characters are beautifully crafted and so special that you end up really caring what happens to them. Lots of twists and turns...simply brilliant, it is no wonder it was an instant success when it was realised in 18..something (!!!!) i really should research that but the book is at the other end of the room and i'm v v lazy!! 1859..there ya go!! A book that will stay with you and inspire you Top class

Why bother?
I love George Eliot, who often shows an insight into the beauty and complexity of characters that astounds me. This book, however, shows very little of that. It is the story of one woman's seduction and the repurcussions of that, jutxtaposed with another woman's low-church morality and set in a backdrop of wholesome country life. It embodies a world view which Eliot herself later rejected.

If you want to read a book about seduction, read Hardy's Tess. If you want to read a book about the value of simple country morality, read Eliot's Silais Marner. Either way, unless you have a strong stomach for late Victoian nostalgia, you can give this one a miss.

This is a classic because it's a really good read!
Right from the first scene, as the sunshine beams into the carpenter's workshop, there's a suggestion of idyllic English countryside about this novel, but, although some of the characters are idealised in places, George Eliot is interested in realism and the story turns on a tragedy which we still see in newspapers today. Despite this, Adam Bede is a good old-fashioned story in the sense that it leaves you gladder for having met its characters and feeling heart-whole from the experience of reading it.