SOURCE: “Infanticide and Respectability: Hetty Sorrel as Abandoned Child in Adam Bede,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. IX, No. 2, June, 1983, pp. 177-96.

In the following essay, Harris examines the character of Hetty Sorrel and her place in the larger narrative of Adam Bede, and discusses the realism of her despair and flight.

Adam Bede has usually been enjoyed and interpreted as a celebration of pastoral community, a loving backward look at a long-vanished rural world. Yet much of this novel's interest, especially for the modern reader, lies in its combination of nostalgic retrospect with “modern” problems not usually found in a pastoral. In particular, Hetty Sorrel's unwed pregnancy, desperate flight, abandonment of her child, and trial for its murder, seems to many readers the most striking episode in the novel. Eliot's vivid depiction of Hetty's flight has attracted some excellent criticism: both Barbara Hardy and Ian Adam...