Who wrote the novel "Adam Bede"?

"Adam Bede", the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time. The novel has remained in print ever since and is used in university studies of 19th-century English literature.

The title character, a carpenter, is in love with an unmarried woman who bears a child by another man. Although Bede tries to help her, he eventually loses her but finds happiness with someone else.

"Adam Bede" was Eliot’s first long novel. She described the work as “a country story full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.” Its masterly realism-evident, for example, in the recording of Derbyshire dialect-brought to English fiction the same truthful observation of minute detail that John Ruskin had commended in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. But what was new in this work of English fiction was the combination of deep human sympathy and rigorous moral judgment.

George Eliot (1819 - 1880) was an English Victorian novelist who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction. Her major works include "Adam Bede" (1859), "The Mill on the Floss" (1860), "Silas Marner" (1861), "Middlemarch" (1871–72), and "Daniel Deronda" (1876).