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Adam Bede
[ beed ]
noun
- a novel (1859) by George Eliot.
Example Sentences
Eliot, in her first novel, observed that Adam Bede seems “to find reassurance in the eternal truth of mathematics, consoling himself after his father’s death with the thought that ‘the square o’ four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man’s miserable as when he’s happy.’”
“The Mill on the Floss” is more famous, but I felt that “Adam Bede,” her first long novel, was actually better and more original.
St Ogg’s in The Mill on the Floss was partly modelled on Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, while Hayslope in Adam Bede is Ellastone, the Staffordshire village where Eliot’s father had lived as a young man.
“Do I really expect Americans to sit down with ‘Adam Bede’ or ‘Clarissa’ after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day?” he asks in an essay bemoaning “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Although she still published as George Eliot, she had revealed her true identity shortly after the publication of Adam Bede, her second work of fiction, whose runaway success prompted intense speculation about who was behind the pseudonym – and the emergence of a pretender demanding royalties.
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