What one reviewer at amazon said about Adam Bede:
ADAM BEDE is a thrilling read, though it may seem hard to believe given the unpromising setting and the stilted way Eliot introduces her story. But after the first few starchy chapters, abruptly, something wonderful happens: she gets wise to herself. It's as if you can see her realize that the upright characters she *thought* she was pinning her story on, dull Dinah and Mr Irwine, aren't really the stuff of which fiction is made -- so she shoves them aside and takes up the flawed characters of her triangle, who resonate with possibility at every turn. Suddenly, miraculously, with almost no warning, all Eliot's amazing gifts as a writer take center stage: Her psychological insight. Her phenomenal wit. The dramatizing genius that allows her, effortlessly, to plot the most intimate narrative developments against the gigantic backdrop of a county-wide feast or funeral. Her fearlessness and surefootedness in picking her way (and ours) through the tangle of social and class relationships of an entire village. In this embarrassment of riches, maybe most rewarding for a reader like me is Eliot's unerring ability to pay off her plots: here, ladies and gentlemen, is a writer who knows how to write the hell out of a climax -- George Eliot's big confrontation scenes never, ever disappoint.
Too, some wizardry seems to keep her narrative touch both incomparably delicate and completely unflinching at the same time. At the heart of ADAM BEDE is a story so sordid I wonder whether it could be broadcast on network TV today, and Eliot tells it without vulgarity but without ever shying away from its ugliness. My most serious criticism of the book is that Eliot didn't quite trust herself enough not to tack an unconvincing (and, worse, uninteresting) happy ending onto her story. But the hair-raising drive of the middle two-thirds of the book is something you'll never forget.
Download Adam Bede from Project Gutenberg
or find a hard copy