It is the shortest and most fable-like of George Eliot’s novels, and the best place to begin with her — a small, perfect story about a lonely miser whose gold is stolen and who finds, in its place, something worth infinitely more.
Silas Marner is a weaver, cast out and betrayed, who withdraws from the human world and lets his heart shrink to the pile of coins he counts each night. Then the gold is stolen — and soon after, a golden-haired orphan child wanders into his cottage out of the snow, and the miser, almost against his will, takes her in. Raising little Eppie slowly thaws him back into a human being; the child is the treasure the gold could never be. It is Eliot’s most hopeful book, a parable of a dead soul brought back to life by love.
Do not mistake its simplicity for slightness. Beneath the fairy-tale shape is Eliot’s whole moral vision — that we are saved not by wealth or doctrine but by our ties to other people, by being needed and needing in return. It is the gentlest possible introduction to the greatest of the English novelists.
This edition gathers it in the complete George Eliot, beside The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch.
Read George Eliot: The Complete Works →
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