George Eliot’s third novel, Silas Marner (1861) is a powerful and moving tale about one man’s journey from exile and loneliness to the warmth and joy of the family. The story opens as Silas Marner, falsely accused of theft, loses everything, including his faith in God. Embittered and alienated from his fellow man, he moves to the village of Raveloe, where he becomes a weaver. Taking refuge in his work, Silas slowly begins to accumulate gold—his only joy in life—until one day that too is stolen from him. Then one dark evening, a beautiful, golden-haired child, lost and seeing the light from Silas’s cottage, toddles in through his doorway. As Silas grows to love the girl as if she were his own daughter, his life changes into something precious. But his happiness is threatened when the orphan’s real father comes to claim the girl as his own, and Silas must face losing a treasure greater than all the gold in the world. This volume also includes two shorter works by Eliot—The Lifted Veil, a dark Gothic fantasy about a morbid young clairvoyant, and Brother Jacob, a deliciously satirical fable about a confectioner’s apprentice.
Author
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She was born in 1819 at a farmstead in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, where her father was estate manager. Mary Ann, the youngest child and a favorite of her father's, received a good education for a young woman of her day. Influenced by a favorite governess, she became a religious evangelical as an adolescent. Her first published work was a religious poem. Through a family friend, she was exposed to Charles Hennell's "An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity". Unable to believe, she conscientiously gave up religion and stopped attending church. Her father shunned her, sending the broken-hearted young dependent to live with a sister until she promised to reexamine her feelings. Her intellectual views did not, however, change. She translated Das Leben Jesu, a monumental task, without signing her name to the 1846 work. After her father's death in 1849, Mary Ann traveled, then accepted an unpaid position with The Westminster Review. Despite a heavy workload, she translated The Essence of Christianity, the only book ever published under her real name. That year, the shy, respectable writer scandalized British society by sending notices to friends announcing she had entered a free "union" with George Henry Lewes, editor of The Leader, who was unable to divorce his first wife. They lived harmoniously together for the next 24 years, but suffered social ostracism and financial hardship. She became salaried and began writing essays and reviews for The Westminster Review. Renaming herself "Marian" in private life and adopting the penname "George Eliot," she began her impressive fiction career, including: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), and Middlemarch (1871). Themes included her humanist vision and strong heroines. Her poem, "O May I Join the Choir Invisible" expressed her views about non supernatural immortality: "O may I join the choir invisible/ Of those immortal dead who live again/ In minds made better by their presence. . ." D. 1880. Her 1872 work Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language. More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George\_E... http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic... http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t... http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian... http://www.biography.com/people/georg... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/d...
