As I mentioned a few weeks ago when I posted some thoughts on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, 2024 is turning out to be a year with George Eliot for me as I work my way through her work chronologically with an Instagram group. I had read only two of her novels before — Adam Bede and Middlemarch (and I can’t wait to reread Middlemarch when it comes around!) — and I loved them. I considered Eliot to be one of my favorite authors whose work I still needed to read, so several of these books have been on my bucket list for years and years. A friend gifted me a now lost copy of the Signet Classics edition of Silas Marner clear back in 2003, and I think I’ve always just been waiting for the perfect time to read it. Sometimes you have to make the perfect time!

The only idea I had of Silas Marner going into it came from that Signet Classics edition, which shows an older man holding and seemingly shielding from the wind or the world a little girl. I expected it to be some tale of loss where an older man has to take care of, say, his granddaughter in some degree of poverty.

Imagine my surprise when I started to get to know the titular character and realized that he was not a grandfatherly figure. When we first get to know him he is completely alone. He grew up in another community to the north, where he was well liked and had faith in others. Due to a serious betrayal, though, Marner was forsaken and he turned around and left, ending up in a new community though not a part of it. Some years later, when the book begins, he is a stranger to his neighbors, and he sits alone at night counting his money, though with no plans for its disposal. Those around him see him not only as a stranger but as a strange person. He has catalepsy, and so periodically from the perspective of those around him he drifts away in spirit, leaving his body behind. This has made him an object of superstition, and whether for ill or good depends on the observer’s own predilections. This is who we come to know, “Poor Marner,” who “went out with that despair in his soul — that shaken trust in God and man, which is little short of madness to a loving nature.”

Eliot soon introduces another central character, Godfrey Cass. Godfrey is the wealthy heir to the squire, but he has his own history that causes him a great deal of dread and anxiety. And wow does Eliot know how to depict dread and anxiety! Soon Marner and Godfrey’s lives will cross in ways neither could expect.

Where was the young girl? Where was the rather sentimental story I had pictured in my mind? Of course, I didn’t care that, even after crossing the halfway part of the book, we hadn’t met her and my incorrect idea of the book was clearly going to be wrong. Eliot was clearly giving me something different, and it was something I connected with deeply. I loved the story, and I loved Eliot’s tender presentation of deep pain and deep need for community. Godfrey has that community but is always afraid that his past will destroy his position in it. As for Silas, how can a man find peace who feels this way:

Nobody in this world but himself knew that he was the same Silas Marner who had once loved his fellow with tender love, and trusted in an unseen goodness. Even to himself that past experience had become dim.

And yet Eliot shows in this beautiful story some sense of coming together that I found hopeful and encouraging and completely earned.

Soon we’ll be onto Eliot’s next novel, Romola. I have no idea whatsoever what to expect in Romola. I don’t even have an old cover to give me some incorrect perception of what’s to come. But now have read four of Eliot’s seven novels, I have no worries. I’m excited to keep going!