George Eliot

Works by George Eliot:

• Silas Marner
• The Mill on the Floss

From Our Blog:

Adopting Metaphor

Sometimes Silas Marner is not taken seriously as literature, so much as a trite, happy-endinged little tract about faith and being a good person. But I'm here to say that that attitude is really uppity. This book has some really good things to say about clinging to something metaphoric, like money, Protestantisms, and notions of dignity, paternity and maternity, and how these are reductive and dumb. Marner clings to his gold and his Lantern Yard asceticism, and look where that gets him: lonely and miserable and a miser. When Eppie, the stock gold-ringleted orphan of Victoriana, waddles into his hovel, he begins to cling to something more real. He has a daughter; he has love. He even adopts the Raveloe faith, because you know what, material can be effortlessly interchangeable if the metaphor stays the same.