Silas Marner leads a simple life as a weaver in the village of Raveloe. All he does is work, he has no friends and the only thing he loves is his money, which he counts every day. Then one day his money is stolen and a little girl comes to live with him. Soon Silas Marner starts ... read full description below.
Wrote the publisher John Blackwood in February 1857 to a shy and ambitious new author, whom he had not yet met, George Eliot. Shielded by this pseudonymn, Mary Ann Evans made her fictional début when Scenes of Clerical Life appeared in Blackwood's Magazine the same year. These are Eliot's earliest studies of what became enduring themes: the impact of religious controversy and social change in provincial life, and the power of love to transform the lives of individual men and women. In 'The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton', Amos learns only after her death the value of Milly's selfless love; 'Mr Gilfil's Love Story' tells of a clergyman's life-long devotion to the memory of Caterina, destroyed by her passion for another lover; in 'Janet's Repentance', the life of the alchoholic Janet Dempster is decisively changed by the attractiveness of Rev. Tryan, an evangelical preacher.
Only in her final novel, in 1876, did George Eliot turn to contemporary English and European life as material for the expression of her own idealism. Daniel Deronda is a psychologically incisive investigation, probing the egoism of a spoiled girl and her increasing awareness of conscience through suffering. Gwendolen comes to regard Daniel as her moral and spiritual mentor, but chance, the revelation of his Jewish birth, and his practical and sympathetic identification with his race draw him away from her. The text is that of Graham Handley's Clarendon edition, which is based on the novel's first published form. emergent nationalism and the bitter internal struggle.
Silas Marner, a simple, religious man, angrily retreats from his community and church when he is unjustly accused of theft. In an isolated cottage, Silas spends his days weaving cloth and his nights sifting through the piles of gold he obsessively accumulates. Then, one New Year's Eve, a little girl, Eppie, appears at his home, and his life is miraculously transformed. Elio
' "If a woman really believes herself to be a lower kind of being, she should place herself in subjection . . . If not, let her show her power of choosing something better." ' This is the challenge thrown down to Esther Lyon, George Eliot's heroine in Felix Holt: The Radical (1866). Esther's 'airs and graces', her proud and sensitive dreams of marrying into a life of refinement are transformed in the course of the novel, as she makes her choice between Harold Transome, who has returned to Treby Magna to claim his inheritance, Transome Court, and to campaign in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act for a Radical seat in Parliament, and Felix Holt, a young radical of a different kind. For this Penguin Classics edition Lynda Mugglestone provides an introduction, bibliography and notes, together with appendices on the legal background to the plot and on the 'Address to Working Men, By Felix Holt'.
