The fictitious landscape of Loamshire provides the setting for this country tragedy, with little peace about the intertwined lives of its inhabitants. Dinah Morris is an earnest Methodist preacher who rejects Seth Bede for a life devoted to God. Adam Bede, his brother, is also rejected, but by Hetty Sorrel, a gullible dairymaid who falls for dashing Arthur Donnithorne, the squire's heir. The passions roused in the community of Hayslope have disastrous consequences: a fight between two rivals, an illegitimate pregnancy and a woman driven to desperate deeds. In Adam Bede George Eliot gripped her readers with an imaginative and complex tale.