Adam Bede — George Eliot

A young woman is tried for the death of her newborn child, and the two witnesses who decide her fate are ordinary villagers who happened to see something on a lonely road. George Eliot builds the emotional and legal centre of Adam Bede around exactly that kind of testimony — plain, unpolished, and devastating precisely because it is so ordinary.

In two minutes

The trial of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede turns on the plain testimony of two witnesses, Sarah Stone and John Olding, and George Eliot uses their evidence to show how an ordinary person's fate can be decided less by legal argument than by a handful of unremarkable facts, honestly told.

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