George Eliot was the pseudonym of
Mary Ann Evans, born in 1819 at the estate
of her father’s employer in Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England. She
was sent to boarding school, where she developed a strong religious
faith, deeply influenced by the evangelical preacher Rev. John Edmund
Jones. After her mother’s death, Evans moved with her father to
the city of Coventry. There she met Charles and Caroline Bray, progressive
intellectuals who led her to question her faith. In 1842 she
stopped going to church, and this renunciation of her faith put
a strain on Evans’s relationship with her father that did not ease
for several years.
Evans became acquainted with intellectuals in Coventry
who broadened her mind beyond a provincial perspective. Through
her new associations, she traveled to Geneva and then to London, where
she worked as a freelance writer. In London she met George Lewes,
who became her husband in all but the legal sense—a true legal marriage
was impossible, as Lewes already had an estranged wife. At this
point in her life Evans was still primarily interested in philosophy,
but Lewes persuaded her to turn her hand to fiction instead. The
publication of her first collection of stories in 1857, under
the male pseudonym of George Eliot, brought immediate acclaim from
critics as prestigious as Charles Dickens and William Makepeace
Thackeray, as well as much speculation about the identity of the
mysterious George Eliot. After the publication of her next book
and first novel, Adam Bede, a number of impostors
claimed authorship. In response, Evans asserted herself as the true
author, causing quite a stir in a society that still regarded women
as incapable of serious writing. Lewes died in 1878,
and in 1880 Evans married a banker named
John Walter Cross, who was twenty-one years her junior. She died
the same year.
Eliot wrote the novels Adam Bede (1859)
and The Mill on the Floss (1860)
before publishing Silas Marner (1861),
the tale of a lonely, miserly village weaver transformed by the
love of his adopted daughter. Eliot is best known, however, for Middlemarch (1871–1872).
Subtitled “A Study in Provincial Life,” this lengthy work tells
the story of a small English village and its inhabitants, centering
on the idealistic and self-sacrificing Dorothea Brooke.
Eliot’s novels are deeply philosophical. In exploring
the inner workings of her characters and their relationship to their
environment, she drew on influences that included the English poet
William Wordsworth, the Italian poet Dante, the English art critic
John Ruskin, and the Portuguese-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose
work Eliot translated into English. The philosophical concerns and
references found in her novels—and the refusal to provide the requisite
happy ending—struck some contemporary critics as unbecoming in a
lady novelist. Eliot’s detailed and insightful psychological portrayals
of her characters, as well as her exploration of the complex ways
these characters confront moral dilemmas, decisively broke from
the plot-driven domestic melodrama that had previously served as
the standard for the Victorian novel. Eliot’s break from tradition
inspired the modern novel and inspired numerous future authors,
among them Henry James, who admirered Eliot.
Silas Marner was Eliot’s third novel
and is among the best known of her works. Many of the novel’s themes
and concerns stem from Eliot’s own life experiences. Silas’s loss
of religious faith recalls Eliot’s own struggle with her faith,
and the novel’s setting in the vanishing English countryside reflects
Eliot’s concern that England was fast becoming industrialized and
impersonal. The novel’s concern with class and family can likewise
be linked back to Eliot’s own life. The voice of the novel’s narrator
can thus, to some extent, be seen as Eliot’s own voice—one tinged
with slight condescension, but fond of the setting and thoroughly
empathetic with the characters. Though Silas Marner is
in a sense a very personal novel for Eliot, its treatment of the
themes of faith, family, and class has nonetheless given it universal
appeal, especially at the time of publication, when English society
and institutions were undergoing rapid change.
The Epigraph
“A child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.”
—William Wordsworth
At his death, eleven years before the publication of Silas
Marner, William Wordsworth was widely considered the most
important English writer of his time. His intensely personal poetry,
with its simple language and rhythms, marked a revolutionary departure from
the complex, formal structures and classical subject matter of his
predecessors, poets such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Unlike
the poetry of Dryden and Pope, Wordsworth’s poems are meditative
rather than narrative. They celebrate beauty and simplicity most
often most often located in the natural landscape. Wordsworth’s
influence on English poetry—at a time when poetry was unquestioningly
held to be the most important form of literature—was enormous. Along
with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth set in motion the Romantic
era, inspiring a generation of poets that included John Keats, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.
George Eliot evidently felt a kinship with Wordsworth
and his strong identification with the English landscape. Like Wordsworth, Eliot
draws many of her metaphors from the natural world. However, the
Wordsworth epigraph she chose for Silas Marner also
highlights the philosophical aspect of her affinity with Wordsworth. Like
Eliot, Wordsworth had tried his hand at philosophy before turning
to more literary pursuits, and in his poetry he works out his conception
of human consciousness. One of Wordsworth’s major ideas, radical
at the time, was that at the moment of birth, human beings move
from a perfect, idealized “otherworld” to this imperfect world,
characterized by injustice and corruption. Children, being closest
to that otherworld, can remember its beauty and purity, seeing its
traces in the natural world around them. As they grow up, however,
they lose that connection and forget the knowledge they had as children.
However, as described in the quote Eliot has chosen, children and
the memories of childhood they evoke in adults can still bring us
close to that early, idyllic state. It is not hard to imagine that
Eliot had this model in mind when she wrote her story of a child
bringing a man out of isolation and spiritual desolation.
