Adam Bede by George Eliot

ADAM BEDE is the first published novel by George Eliot. The story follows four characters' lives in the rural and close-knit English community of Hayslope in 1799. The novel revolves around a love "rectangle" between beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel, Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her, Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor, and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent, virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher.