Adam Bede is a hardy young carpenter who cares for his aging mother. His one weakness is the woman he loves blindly: the trifling town beauty, Hetty Sorrel, whose only delights are her baubles—and the delusion that the careless Captain Donnithorne may ask for her hand.

Betrayed by their innocence, both Adam and Hetty allow their foolish hearts to trap them in a triangle of seduction, murder, and retribution.

The novel follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope—a pastoral and close-knit community in 1799. It revolves around a love "rectangle" between the beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel; Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her; Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor; and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent, virtuous, and beautiful Methodist lay preacher.

Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eighteenth century, this book relates a story of seduction issuing in "the inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis".