Silas Marner

Silas Marner is a gentle linen weaver who is wrongly accused of a heinous theft that was committed by his best friend. After going into reclusion, he finds redemption and spiritual rebirth issuing from his unselfish love of an abandoned child who mysteriously appears one day in his cottage. George Eliot shows how character is rewarded in this ageless, heartwarming novel. George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans (1819-1880), was an English Victorian novelist of the first rank. An assistant editor for the Westminster Review from 1851 to 1854, she wrote her first fiction in 1857 and her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, in 1859. Her writing was chiefly preoccupied with moral problems, especially the moral development of her characters.