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: #1538492 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 688 pages

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

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

Key to this volume is the 158-page introduction, which is full of erudition, packed with information, and concludes with a descriptive listing of editions of Adam Bede (Choice )

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

A gripping tale of a honourable life
Why hasn't anyone written a review for this book? Is it because it's a classic, and therefore one cannot praise it more? I thought it was wonderful. The story of the honest, upright and faithful Adam Bede and his quiet life beautifully unfolds, with deliciously scripted detail. One of the most remarkable things about the book is the that the delightful description does not prevent tension and drama from unfolding, but adds to the suspense of the various situations Adam finds himself in.

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.

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.