Silas’ reaction to her arrival is very well portrayed, as he sees her as a kind of redeeming gift from the God whom he felt had deserted him. Happily not! Eppie is wilful, naughty and refreshingly normal, and won past even my pretty strong anti-child defences. I also feared that Eppie might be one of these saccharin, perfect angels that infest Victorian fiction, usually shortly before they die tragically. Happily, however, once she has staked her claim to social and intellectual superiority, she moves on quite quickly, and her depiction of individual members of “the poor” is much more nuanced and insightful than this opening monologue had led me to fear.

Whenever one of these 19th century writers talks about “the poor”, I feel I get a better understanding of why people invented guillotines. “The poor”, apparently, are rather stupid, highly superstitious, easily led, and would fall somewhere not far above beasts of the field in a zoological league table.

It gets off to a bit of a rocky start, as Eliot pontificates for a while about “the poor”, in that supercilious way that suggests they are one homogenous mass, easy to categorise, define and condescend to. Its brevity is undoubtedly another point in its favour! This one has what, for me, Middlemarch lacked – a strong plot. So the pleasure of discovering that I loved it was all the greater for being unexpected. Silas discovers the body of the child’s mother nearby in the snow, and decides to adopt the girl, whom he calls Hephzibah, or Eppie for short.īeing one of the small minority who didn’t love Middlemarch, I began this one with a lot of hesitation – a book I felt should read rather than one I wanted to. He is still reeling and depressed from this disaster when, a short time later, a little girl walks through his door. And so his life may have continued, but that one night his hoard of gold is stolen.

Here Silas lives alone, plying his trade as a linen weaver and accumulating a store of gold which he carefully hides and takes out each night to lovingly count. Raveloe is a small rural village with a strong sense of community among the working class, who, as tradition demands, show deference to the local Squire and his feckless sons. Unjustly accused of theft, Silas Marner, his faith in God and man shattered, flees his home and church and sets himself up in a new place where he knows no one and no one knows him. The importance of community… 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Silas marner author