TV Reviews : ‘Adam Bede’: Eliot’s Story of Seduction

The Victorian novelist George Eliot, who wrote under a man’s name, reached back to her pastoral origins for her first novel, “Adam Bede” (1859), which was, she said, “a country story--full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.”

It’s that musty rural imagery, complete with a rich Midlands dialect, that earmarks the British adaptation of “Adam Bede,” a classic 19th-Century story of the seduction of a dairymaid and the tremulous consequences. It airs Sunday on “Masterpiece Theatre” (9 p.m. on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, 8 p.m. on KVCR Channel 24).

As the pregnant dairymaid Hetty, who flees across country to Windsor seeking her soldier lover, Patsy Kensit vividly captures the naivete and the amorous sins of a pouty temptress who willingly succumbs to the blandishments of a young squire (the clean-cut James Wilby).

In fact, the dairymaid’s sexist plight--her stacked trial and murder conviction for the death of her baby--underscores the author’s sympathies and her own cultural reasoning for using a masculine pen name. Like other Victorian women writers, Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) feared her novel would be derided or ignored if her sex were known.

The opening minutes, which dramatize in flashback the dairymaid’s trial, are choppy, but once the plot is under way, the languor of the piece tightens up. The country accents are not always comprehensible, but that’s a minor irritant; the veracity of the production is what matters.

Adapted by Maggie Wadey and directed by Giles Foster, events course over sweeping, rippling fields and forests. In many ways, Eliot’s fine pastoral novel counterpoints novelist Willa Cather’s landmark Nebraska saga about our own Midlands, “O Pioneers!”