A married man, Lewes could not marry Eliot, but they lived together until Lewes's death. At about his time Eliot began her lifelong relationship with George Henry Lewes. She soon began publishing sketches of country life in London magazines. In 1849, after the death of her father, she went to London and became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a radical magazine. Eliot read extensively, and was particularly drawn to the romantic poets and German literature. She received a modest local education and was particularly influenced by one of her teachers, an extremely religious woman whom the novelist would later use as a model for various characters. George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans on a Warwickshire farm in England, where she spent almost all of her early life. Eliot's father lived in the village as a carpenter in a substantial house now known as Adam Bede's Cottage). (The real village where Adam Bede was set is Ellastoneon the Staffordshire / Derbyshire border, a few miles from Uttoxeter and Ashbourne, and near to Alton Towers. The novel revolves around a love 'rectangle' among beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent, virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher.

The novel has remained in print ever since and is used in university studies of 19th-century English literature.The story's plot follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope-a rural, pastoral and close-knit community in 1799.

It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time. Read full overviewĪdam Bede the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. Adam Bede the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859.

Adam george eliot novel