It’s a volume of poems, ‘Lyrical Ballads’: most of them seem to be twaddling stuff but the first is in a different style – ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the title.” “I know you are fond of queer, wizard-like stories. Lyrical Ballads itself – published one year before the start of the story of Adam Bede – is explicitly mentioned in the novel: Arthur Donnithorne, the future squire, presents a volume to his godmother: In that poem, we are presented with a woman who is demented with guilt and grief, and who, it is implied, may have murdered her illegitimate child. This is, one suspects, a somewhat familiar theme: it had occurred earlier, and more famously, in Wordsworth’s poem “The Thorn”, included in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. The lines are from The Excursion – not admittedly one of Wordsworth’s better-known efforts – in which, at one point, a pastor tells of a young woman, now dead, who had been seduced and abandoned, and who is buried next to a baby to whom she had given birth in “distress and shame”. Upon whose lapse, or error, something more I speak of such among the flock that swerved Although reluctant at first, Dinah eventually agrees to marry Adam.Īdam Bede addresses profound questions of morality, religion, and the role of women in society, while at the same time seeking to establish a new aesthetic for fiction.One comes to a novel by the author of Middlemarch with the highest of expectations, even when one knows that the novel is her first, and that the author may not, so early in her career, have completely mastered her craft, or be in full or even partial possession yet of a mature artistic vision.Īdam Bede is prefaced with a few lines by Wordsworth:Īnd flowers that prosper in the shade.
Some months later, after Dinah comforts Adam during his mother's illness, Adam comes to realize that he loves Dinah. After she is convicted for child-murder, Arthur finally hears the news, and Hetty's commuted sentence (transportation) saves her from the gallows. She then runs off with the infant and buries it in the brush, where it dies. Distraught, Hetty restrains herself from suicide and gives birth in a lodging-house. She runs away to find Arthur, but discovers that his regiment has been called away. Soon after, Adam proposes to Hetty, who accepts, only to discover she is pregnant with Arthur's child. When Adam finds out about Arthur's intentions toward Hetty, he fights Arthur and forces him to leave town. But she is distracted by the attentions of Captain Arthur Donnithorne. Meanwhile, Adam Bede woos Dinah's cousin Hetty Sorrel. However, she wants to devote herself to God's work. Seth proposes to Dinah Morris, a gifted Methodist preacher. The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by George Eliot.Īdam and Seth Bede work as carpenters in Hayslope.
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