Silas Marner

I was under the sexist opinion that George Eliot was a man. How pleasantly surprising that George was actually Mary Ann Evans, a woman gifted with powerful insight into human behaviour. The story of Silas Marner is that of a wronged man who finds solace in solitude and hoarding. The ritual and monotony of his loom keeps him captive, the reckoning and manifestation of his gold gives him companionship. One day his gold is stolen replaced by a far more precious gem, an orphan girl. An abandoned child offers Silas salvation, a withered miser offers the child a home. Together they change each other and those around them. The story is replete with penetrating behavioural analyses applicable to all of us but just beyond our reach.

While reading SILAS MARNER, I kept thinking of a scene from Season Five of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, in which Tara's father and other relatives come to take her back home with them, very much against her inclination. Once Buffy realizes that Tara wants to stay, she states that they can take Tara only by going through her first, which causes the father to ask, "We are Tara's blood-kin. Who are you to interfere in her affairs?" To which Buffy replies, "We're family." The same emotions that I felt watching that episode of BUFFY came roaring back in the marvelous scene near the end of this novel when Mr. Cass decides to reveal after sixteen years of denial that Eppie is his daughter and will take her to live with him instead of Silas when he says, "Your coming now and saying 'I'm her father' doesn't alter the feeling inside us. It's me she's been calling her father ever since she could say the word." And Eppie herself adds, "And he's took care of me and loved me from the first, and I'll cleave to him as long as he lives, and nobody shall ever come between him and me." It is one of the lovelier climaxes of any 19th century English novel. SILAS MARNER is very much a novel about faith and the search for those values that make life worth living. Marner himself seeks early on to find hope in a superstitious religion that ultimately disappoints him, and later in the acquisition of gold through hard labor, gold that is stolen from him. The money is later returned to him, but during the long interval he discovers the power and greater importance of love and simple human relationships, as he inadvertently inherits a young toddler who miraculously appears inside his cottage whom he adopts as his own child. Despite his hurts and crusty personality, Marner in loving the child is brought into the larger community as well, and achieves a kind of happiness he scarcely imagined earlier in his life. These concerns were very real to Mary Anne Evans, better known by her penname of George Eliot. Though of humble intellectual origins, she was precociously intelligent, and no figure of the 19th century overcame such obstacles to become one of the leading intellectuals of her day. In the 20th or 21st century, Evans would have held a chair of religion or literature at Cambridge or Oxford. Instead, she wrote literary reviews on a host of books on a wide range of subjects, made some of the most important translations into English of crucial German theological texts ever made (Feuerbach's THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY and David Strauss's THE LIFE OF JESUS), and wrote some of the most intellectual novels of the century. Eliot's novels are remarkable for their intellectual diversity and depth. Her novels constitute a fascinating exploration for how to have faith in a post-Christian world, and in this way she is the most typical post-Darwinian novelist of the 19th century. Furthermore, during the first half of her career as a novelist, she brought the novel down to

If you have a heart, the story of Silas Marner will warm it. You are better coming to it fresh, without knowing anything of the simple yet solid plot, so I will say nothing of it. I will just urge you to read this wonderful book. Eliot writes beautifully and from page one, you realize you are in the hands of a true artist. This is a very human, very English story of simple people living through those very basic emotions that make the world turn and give the universe meaning.

Reviews of this novel, seem to fall into three categories: those written by people who like to read great literature; those written by people who would prefer to read brain candy; and those written students forced to read the novel as a class assignment and,in some cases, would prefer not to read anything (if the third category is discarded, the average rating is much higher).One of the most remarkable things about this novel is the fact it was written by a woman, using a male pen name, in 19th century England when women were generally oppressed, i.e., they were not encouraged to have careers or to do anything outside the home. The story is well known. A man who blacks out during seizures, not remembering what happened, is falsely accused of theft of money from his church. He is shunned by his former friends and becomes a recluse. When he is later robbed of his savings, and an abandoned child appears on his doorstep in place of the gold, his life is changed as he takes responsibility for the child.This is classic literature from that time period, and is most certainly easier to read than many other novels from the same period (students should consider themselves fortunate that they were not assigned to read one of Thomas Hardy's novels). I first became acquainted with the novel when it was assigned reading in a high school English class. That was over 50 years ago, and the story is one that has stuck in my mind.

Question: How can you ensure that a person will hate a book? Answer: Make her read it for 7th grade English class, make sure that the language is old-fashioned, and above all, make sure that the ideas and concepts are over her head. If that's what happened to you, and that's why you have an aversion to Silas Marner, and you are now over 30, pick it up again. Read it twice. Silas Marner is one of the greatest novels in the English language. Yes, it starts out sad, as our pathetic hero looses both his trust in humanity and his faith in God. But the power of love replaces his lust for money, and wins out in the end. Meanwhile, morally poor but financially rich, high-living Godfrey Cass provides a counterpoint to simple Silas. At the end there's a surprise when the fate of Godfrey's evil brother is revealed. When you're all done, before you file Silas Marner on the shelf, go back and read the paragraph about Silas' thoughts when he discovers that his hordes of coins are missing. If you have ever felt sudden extreme loss, you will recognize the stages of despair from disbelief to acceptance "like a man falling into dark water." Which is why this book is not suitable for children, and is most appreciated by those who have undergone their own moral redemption.Silas has been the inspiration for many other characters, including Dicken's Scrooge. He has been portrayed in movies, including "A Simple Twist of Fate" starring Steve Martin. But none is as good as the original. If you haven't read it since junior high, try it again. Silas Marner is an excellent book. There's a gem of human understanding in every chapter.