Adam Bede was the first novel written by George Eliot. The book centers around the lives of four people living in a fictional rural city. The title character is a much admired carpenter who falls in love with the self-absorbed Hetty Sorret. Mary Anne Evans was a prominent English author during the Victorian era who wrote under the pen name George Eliot in hopes that her works would be taken more seriously. Eliot would go on to write some of the greatest novels in English literature such as Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and The Mill on the Floss. Eliot's works are also well known for their psychological insight.