Silas Marner (Wordsworth Classics) [Paperback]

This Wordsworth Edition includes an exclusive 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.

Falsely accused of theft and cast out by the religious community of which he was a member, Silas Marner leaves his home and settles in Raveloe, where he leads a solitary existence as a weaver. Marner's work is in great demand, and the wealth that he accumulates becomes his consolation for all that he has lost; but when Dunstan Cass, one of the squire's sons, steals Marner's money the weaver loses his only remaining reason for living. However, one winter night, a little girl wanders into Marner's cottage out of the snow, and the weaver's life is changed for ever.

First published in 1861, this simple but moving story of loss and redemption, and of the transforming power of love, remains the most popular of George Eliot's novels.