Can a person change after a grievous trauma? Can a miser be reformed to see the light of love? George Eliot attempts to answer those questions in her novel Silas Marner. Similarly, it’s worth noting that George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. A Victorian novelist, Evans wrote such novels as Adam Bede (1859), Middlemarch (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876). According to multiple sources, she used a “masculine” pen name to separate her writings from “previous work.” This allowed her “to escape the stereotype that women’s writings were limited to lighthearted romances.”

Summary of Silas Marner

To Start with Controversy

Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, published in 1861, tells the tale of Silas Marner. The law accuses Marner of stealing church funds at his Northern England congregation in Lantern Yard. From there, he leaves his town now unwed, unfriended, and alone. He lives as a misanthrope in the Midlands, which comes close to the village of Raveloe in Warwickshire.

Furthermore, a thief steals from Silas, and he again falls emotionally sallow. His life has become a series of misfortunes. However, on the evening of a local’s New Year’s Eve party, Silas encounters a young girl. As it turns out, her mother has died from hypothermia out in the cold. Silas decides to take in the child, who he names Eppie. He finds it to be repayment for his lost money. Through child rearing, he finds himself receiving money from the child’s real father. Her real father can not tell the truth of his infidelity for fear of losing his soon-to-be-wife. He also receives a great many advices from his neighbor Dolly.

In the Ensuing Years

Eventually, years later, the son of a squire finds Silas’s gold at the bottom of a quarry. Meanwhile, Eppie grows into a proud and loved citizen. And, Eppie’s real father attempts to entice her to live with him. This is after he reveals his infidelity and after he and his wife’s child dies. Eppie declines due to her love of Silas as a father figure in her life.

After returning to Lantern Yard, Silas finds no evidence of his old village. Instead, he only finds a factory with no trace of the previous inhabitants. However, he is content and moves on with his life.

Book Blurb

From the book: “Silas Marner is an exquisite idyll which is regarded by many as the most perfectly proportioned of George Eliot’s novels. It tells the story of a lonely weaver who, wrongly expelled from the little religious community which has been the support of his life, turns into a selfish and despondent miser. When Marner’s money is stolen and an orphan child, left at his door, takes its place in his affections, his devotion to the golden-haired Eppie brings out all his latent good qualities and redeems his character. Silas Marner, with its humanity and delicate pathos, contains in small compass the qualities which have established George Eliot as one of the greatest of English novelists.”

Critical response

In looking for critical responses on Goodreads, I found there to be 21,183 five-star reviews, 28,923 four-star reviews, 23,089 three-star reviews, 7,711 two star reviews, and 3,407 one-star reviews.

In starting with five-star reviews, many reviewers pointed out the redemptive qualities of the book after “betrayal” and the character’s turn as a “miser.” Others point to its power as a “morality tale” as Marner’s transformation from astute Calvinist, to angry recluse, and back again into something wholesome was a defining characteristic of the book.

One-star reviews state that the book is a “steaming heap of tripe” and that the language is abstruse, which adds to the pain of reading “pages and pages of pointless description.” Additionally, reviewers found it “boring” and “agonizing” as even diagraming sentences from the book “finally pushed (some) over the edge into hating this book.”