A tale of rural tragedy and redemption, George Eliot's first novel

"A first-rate novel" The Times "From Adam Bede to Daniel Deronda, she questioned her times. She plumbed ideas, politics, religion, race, and above all the vagaries of the heart" Guardian "A disconcerting mixture of High Victorian and snappily contemporary. The sentences tend to be massive, slow-moving but deadly accurate: the characters' motivations are dissected, the moral puzzles presented with great clarity" Independent "The whole country life that the story is set in, is so real, and so droll and genuine, and yet so selected and polished by art, that I cannot praise it enough to you" -- Charles Dickens