In the Library
Adam Bede
George Eliot, 1859
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 55
- Length
- Length 213k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy
Hardy plants the same slow rural community around a woman's fate, but lets Bathsheba survive her mistakes instead of paying for them with everything.
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Hardy tells the same story of a village girl ruined by a gentleman's attention, but strips away any chance of mercy from the world around her.
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Middlemarch
George Eliot
Middlemarch widens the same unsparing sympathy from one village to a whole provincial town, and gives Dorothea the moral seriousness Dinah Morris brings to Hayslope.
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About the book
Adam Bede opens in a carpenter's shop thick with the smell of sawn oak, workmen planing wood in time to a hymn, and the whole novel stays this near to ordinary hands and ordinary faces. George Eliot argued, in its most famous chapter, that no rule of art should banish the old woman scraping carrots with her work-worn hands in favor of a painted angel, and she keeps that vow even when the truth turns terrible. Hetty Sorrel, beautiful and barely past girlhood, is seduced by the young heir to her village's great house, carries his child alone into a strange county, and leaves the infant to die in a wood. Adam loses her to Arthur first, then loses her again to the assizes, where she stands trial for her own baby's murder. Eliot's daring was to insist that a vain, silly, ordinary girl could do the unthinkable and still be owed mercy, still be worth Dinah Morris walking into the condemned cell to sit beside her. The carpenter's hands built nothing that lasts longer than that.