English Pronunciation Audio

Adam Bede has taken its place among the actual experiences and endurances of my life.Charles Dickens

Adam Bede, the novel that Alexandre Dumas called the masterpiece of the century, is set in the English Midlands at the turn of the eighteenth century. It is the moving story of three people troubled by unwise love. Adam Bede, a young man possessing dignity and character, loves too blindly; Hetty Sorrel, pretty, vain, and self-centered, loves too recklessly; and Arthur Donnithorne, a dashing young squire, loves too carelessly. Betrayed by their navet, vanity, and impulsiveness, their foolishness leads them into a calamitous triangle of seduction, retribution, and murder.

George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans (1819-1880), was an English novelist of the first rank among Victorian novelists. She was born near Nuneaton, the daughter of a land agent. After her father's death, she became an assistant editor for the Westminster Review from 1851 to 1854. She wrote her first fiction in 1857 and her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, in 1859. Her novels presented a beautifully observed world of peasants and townsfolk, but her greatest preoccupation was with moral problems, especially the moral development of her characters.

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.