Silas Marner [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The highest 'calling and election' is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance. (George Eliot, letter of 26 December i860)1 Silas Marner occupies a special place in George Eliot's career as a novelist. It has understandably been regarded as the last of her 'early' novels, still close in spirit to the pastoral world of Adam Bede; but its double-stranded plot and its preoccupation with lineage, fostering, and alienation can equally well be seen to anticipate Romola, Felix Holt, and Daniel Deronda. On the other hand, the fact that it is by far the shortest of the novels has led some critics, including its earliest ones, to regard it as at best a 'minor masterpiece', while its overt use of fairy-tale motifs, the star role it gives to a pretty child, and its picture-book happy ending have made it a 'children's classic', often published in shortened and expurgated editions. It is certainly George Eliot's most immediately accessible novel. Its world is expressly a circumscribed one, the story moves on more rapidly than in Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss, and the narrator's commentaries are much briefer and less rhetorical. The settings in which its action takes place—Lantern Yard, with its urban environment and evangelical austerity; the Rainbow inn, which provides a focus for the village community; and the Red House, the home of Squire Cass and his sons—are connected and contrasted by means of a broadly symbolic pattern. Its plot, too, is clearly and symmetrically structured: the fifteen years that separate Marner's disgrace at Lantern Yard from the theft of Readers who are entirely unfamiliar with the plot may prefer to treat the Introduction as an afterword. 1 References to GE's letters and journal will be made by date only. The complete text may then easily be found in Gordon S. Haight, The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. (New Haven and London, 1954-78); many of the letters are also reproduced in Haight's Selections from George Eliot's Letters (New Haven and London, 1985).