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In this heartwarming classic, a gentle linen weaver named Silas Marner is wrongly accused of theft actually committed by his best friend. Silas exiles himself to a rustic village, where he finds spiritual rebirth through his unselfish love of an abandoned child. Includes a new Afterword. Revised reissue.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

From George Levine's Introduction to Silas Marner and Two Short Stories               Of all George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner (1861) is the shortest and perhaps the most accessible to modern readers. That is partly because it is the only one of her novels that has the atmosphere of a fable, and indeed seems to have been deliberately written as one. The very qualities of apparent simplicity, clarity, and directness that have always made it among the most popular of her novels have also made it seem as though it is not quite as serious, not quite as "real" as the other much longer and more complex works, most notably Middlemarch (1872), universally recognized as her masterpiece and arguably the greatest nineteenth-century English novel.             Unusual as it seems, among Eliot's other more imposing works, Silas Marner is not as atypical as it at first appears to be. In fact, no book of Eliot's gives more immediate access to the mysteries of her art, or rather, to the central preoccupations, formal and thematic, that determine the shape and style of her novels, and to the difficulties and potential contradictions they confront. Silas Marner , for all its fairy-tale aspects, is also a "realistic" novel, firmly set in time and place, sharply observed, focused not on the extraordinary, but on the everyday. And just as Silas Marner has elements of realism, so the larger works reveal elements of the kind of fable we find here. It does not take very close reading (which every book of George Eliot always deserves and requires) to detect the "fabulous" qualities behind the massive and complex structures of her more evidently realistic work: There is more than a touch of the legendary in Romola (1863, written just after Silas Marner ), and even in Middlemarch , where fable is more elaborately disguised, and certainly in her last great work, Daniel Deronda (1877). Silas Marner , then, is interestingly representative of the work of one of the greatest of nineteenth-century novelists, at the same time as it is satisfyingly brief, precisely constructed, and yet full of the intelligence and circumstantial precision that mark all of Eliot's earlier fiction.             The great late books struggle--usually brilliantly, sometimes with "the odor of the lamp" upon them, as Henry James complained--to get the details of context right and full. The very abundance of contextual detail, of plot and of character, complicates and largely disguises the directness of the moral passion that drives them. George Eliot, a novelist with a moral mission, was too wise to think that morality was a simple matter of right and wrong. And yet, while Silas Marner is brilliantly crafted, it gives off an air of spontaneity and ease that her contemporaries greatly admired (and they often complained that the later novels had lost just that sense of spontaneity as they grew more apparently solemn and philosophical). While all of Eliot's fiction (except for the remarkable short story "The Lifted Veil," included in this volume) are written from the point of view of a sage narrator who does not often hesitate to intrude and comment on the action, Silas Marner 's narrator is quite restrained, although also notably learned and sophisticated. Her eye is on the action, and for the most part, she simply tells the story, swiftly and efficiently, commenting on it only occasionally, though pithily. Throughout her career, Eliot was committed, as she claimed, to keep her stories from lapsing from "the picture to the diagram." She did not want to preach abstractly but, believing that truth is the basis of all moral life, to render faithfully the real world and the real people who lived in it. True morality, she argued, entails recognition of the realities of the world we live in. "Depend upon it," she wrote in her first published story, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton": "You would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones." Her "strongest effort," she wrote in Adam Bede (1859) "is to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind."             Why then, one might ask, does Silas Marner feel so much like a fable with a moral? Doesn't it, as it deals out its punishment for Godfrey Cass's youthful failure or redeems Silas from the moral isolation caused by his friend's betrayal and his own subsequent miserliness, feel just a bit too much like a "diagram"? It is easy to take this remarkable novel as itself too easy, rendering a bit too much "poetic justice." But the texture of the narrative belies the simplicity of its apparent moralizing. Although this is a fable, it contains all its characters within a clearly defined historical and social context, and it allows nobody the kind of heroism that fables usually require. Only Eppie may seem unnaturally endowed with virtue and education, and happily, unlike Dickens with his Oliver Twist, she speaks with the same dialect as those among whom she has lived all her life. Nevertheless, Nancy Lammeter points out that Eppie "doesn't look like a strapping girl come of working parents." Excerpted from Silas Marner by George Eliot All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This 19th-century classic, read by Andrew Sachs, is a tale of betrayal, gold, and love, encased in the elegant symmetrical structure so popular in traditional English fiction, featuring Marner, the weaver, who is framed for theft by his best friend and becomes a recluse, focusing his strong affections only on the store of golden coins he receives in payment for his work. As usual, Chivers has produced an excellent audio presentation of a literary masterpiece. Alas, in this day and age fewer and fewer readers not enrolled in literature classes actually read the works of what are frequently referred to as "dead white males" even if, as in this case, they were actually written by a woman. For this reason, this title is recommended for all academic but only larger public libraries.--I. Pour-El, Iowa State Univ., Ames (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans on a Warwickshire farm in England, where she spent almost all of her early life. She received a modest local education and was particularly influenced by one of her teachers, an extremely religious woman whom the novelist would later use as a model for various characters.

Eliot read extensively, and was particularly drawn to the romantic poets and German literature. In 1849, after the death of her father, she went to London and became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a radical magazine. She soon began publishing sketches of country life in London magazines.

At about his time Eliot began her lifelong relationship with George Henry Lewes. A married man, Lewes could not marry Eliot, but they lived together until Lewes's death.

Eliot's sketches were well received, and soon after she followed with her first novel, Adam Bede (1859). She took the pen name "George Eliot" because she believed the public would take a male author more seriously.

Like all of Eliot's best work, The Mill on the Floss (1860), is based in large part on her own life and her relationship with her brother. In it she begins to explore male-female relations and the way people's personalities determine their relationships with others. She returns to this theme in Silas Mariner (1861), in which she examines the changes brought about in life and personality of a miser through the love of a little girl.

In 1863, Eliot published Romola. Set against the political intrigue of Florence, Italy, of the 1490's, the book chronicles the spiritual journey of a passionate young woman.

Eliot's greatest achievement is almost certainly Middlemarch (1871). Here she paints her most detailed picture of English country life, and explores most deeply the frustrations of an intelligent woman with no outlet for her aspirations. This novel is now regarded as one of the major works of the Victorian era and one of the greatest works of fiction in English.

Eliot's last work was Daniel Deronda. In that work, Daniel, the adopted son of an aristocratic Englishman, gradually becomes interested in Jewish culture and then discovers his own Jewish heritage. He eventually goes to live in Palestine.

Because of the way in which she explored character and extended the range of subject matter to include simple country life, Eliot is now considered to be a major figure in the development of the novel. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery, North London, England, next to her common-law husband, George Henry Lewes.

(Bowker Author Biography)