• Eliot's first full-length novel, Adam Bede paints a powerful portrait of rural life, seduction, faith, and redemption. This is the first edition based on Eliot's final revision of the novel in 1861, using the definitive Clarendon text.
• Includes George Eliot's journal entry on the real-life origins of the story and the composition of the novel, and broadsheet accounts of the execution of Mary Voce, whose story provided the germ of the novel.
• The Introduction discusses the novel's historical context and some of the main issues it explores: the role of work, class, and relations between the sexes, and Eliot's belief that the artist's duty is 'the faithful representing of commonplace things'.
• Comprehensive notes identify literary and historical allusions and evidence of Eliot's wide reading.
• Up-to-date bibliography.

New to this edition

• A completely new and reset text, using the definitive Clarendon edition based on the the corrected eighth edition of 1861.
• New Introduction, Select Bibliography, and Explanatory Notes by Carol A. Martin.
• New Chronology.

Readership: Readers of classic fiction, especially the Victorian novel, George Eliot, women writers; students of nineteenth-century fiction, Victorian literature, women writers, Victorian culture and history, rural fiction

Review(s) from previous edition

"'Carol Martin demonstrates that the first edition will not do and persuasively makes the case for taking as copy-text the corrected 'eighth edition' of 1861...the notes are the best available' - Stephen Gill, The George Eliot Review, No. 33, 2002 [n.b. Gill is editor of the Penguin edition, which uses the first edition text]