Silas Marner: Introduction by Rosemary Ashton [Hardcover]

When Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he vows to turn his back upon the world. He moves to the village of Raveloe, where he remains an outsider and an object of suspicion until an extraordinary sequence of events, including the theft of his gold and the appearance of a tiny, golden-haired child in his cottage, transforms his life. Part beautifully realized rural portraiture and part fairy tale, the story of Marner’s redemption and restoration to humanity has long been George Eliot’s most beloved and widely read work.

The isolated, misanthropic, miserly weaver Silas Marner is one of George Eliot’s greatest creations, and his presence casts a strange, otherworldly glow over the moral dramas, both large and small, that take place in the pastoral landscape that surrounds him.

Introduction by Rosemary Ashton

“More strikingly than in any other novel, George Eliot combines pastoral, symbolic, legendary elements with a rooted local setting and an evocation of ordinary lives and credible moral choices. It is a fine Shakespearian-Wordsworthian story of loss and restoration . . .Silas Marneris a compound of English life rendered with ‘rich density of detail,’ as Henry James described it, and the imaginative patterning of romance and myth.”
—from the Introduction by Rosemary Ashton

"I thinkSilas Marnerholds a higher place than any of the author's works. It is more nearly a masterpiece; it has more of that simple, rounded, consummate aspect. . .which marks a classical work."
—Henry JamesMary Ann Evans was born on November 22, 1819, at Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England, the last child of an estate agent. During her girlhood, she went through a phase of evangelical piety, but her strong interest in philosophy and her friendship with religious freethinkers led to a break with orthodox religion. When one of these friends mlÖ