LoveReading4Kids Says
This title includes introduction and notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary
Fellow of the University of York. Although the shortest of George
Eliot's novels, "Silas Marner" is one of her most admired and loved
works.
It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas
Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural
heartland of England - and how he is restored to life by the unlikely
means of the orphan child Eppie. "Silas Marner" is a tender and moving
tale of sin and repentance set in a vanished rural world and holds the
reader's attention until the last page as Eppie's bonds of affection
for Silas are put to the test.
LoveReading4Kids
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Silas Marner Synopsis
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.
'Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.'
Set in the agricultural town of Raveloe in the English countryside, Silas Marner is a tragic figure. Exiled from a religious community because of a wrongful accusation of theft, he works from day to day as a weaver, saving his money and living a lonely life as a recluse.
It is only when his money is stolen and a small orphan girl, Eppie appears in his life that Silas's fortunes begin to change and he truly begins to learn what it means to regain his faith in life.
About This Edition
ISBN: |
9780007420148 |
Publication date: |
1st January 2011 |
Author: |
George Eliot |
Publisher: |
William Collins an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers |
Format: |
Paperback |
Pagination: |
256 pages |
Series: |
Collins Classics |
Suitable For: |
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Recommendations: |
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About George Eliot
Mary Ann (Marian) Evans was born in 1819 in Warwickshire. She attended schools in Nuneaton and Coventry, coming under the influence of evangelical teachers and clergymen. In 1836 her mother died and Marian became her father's housekeeper, educating herself in her spare time. In 1841 she moved to Coventry, and met Charles and Caroline Bray, local progressive intellectuals. Through them she was commissioned to translate Strauss's Life of Jesus and met the radical publisher John Chapman, who, when he purchased the Westminster Review in 1851, made her his managing editor.
Having lost her Christian faith and thereby alienated her family, she moved to London and met Herbert Spencer (whom she nearly married, only he found her too 'morbidly intellectual') and the versatile man-of-letters George Henry Lewes. Lewes was separated from his wife, but with no possibility of divorce. In 1854 he and Marian decided to live together, and did so until Lewes's death in 1878. It was he who encouraged her to turn from philosophy and journalism to fiction, and during those years, under the name of George Eliot, she wrote Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, as well as numerous essays, articles and reviews.
George Eliot died in 1880, only a few months after marrying J. W. Cross, an old friend and admirer, who became her first biographer. She was buried beside Lewes at Highgate. George Eliot combined a formidable intelligence with imaginative sympathy and acute powers of observation, and became one of the greatest and most influential of English novelists. Her choice of material widened the horizons of the novel and her psychological insights radically influenced the novelist's approach to characterization. Middlemarch, considered by most to be her masterpiece, was said by Virginia Woolf to be 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.
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