Overview
Falsely accused, cut off from his past, Silas the weaver is reduced to
a spider-like existence, endlessly weaving his web and hoarding his
gold. Meanwhile, Godfrey Cass, son of the squire, contracts a secret
marriage. While the village celebrates Christmas and New Year, two
apparently inexplicable events occur: Silas loses his gold and finds a
child on his hearth. The imaginative control George Eliot displays as
her narrative gradually reveals causes and connections has rarely been
surpassed.
Silas Marner (1861) is the shortest and
most immediately accessible of Eliot's novels. She takes the materials
of legend and fairy tale and provides them with a historically precise
setting, drawing on some of the most advanced ideas of her day in order
to represent states of mind and belief at the limits of rational
perception.
This edition, which is based on the carefully
corrected text George Eliot prepared a few months after the first
edition, is accompanied by an introduction which illuminates the
intellectual context of what has often been presented as a nostalgic,
sentimental tale.