The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner: George Eliot

by George Eliot, Nahem Yousaf (Editor), Andrew Maunder (Editor)

This New Casebook explores the enduring significance of George Eliot's novels The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861). Eliot's radical cultural politics and the arrestingly original fictional strategies that characterise two of her most popular novels are explored from a variety of perspectives - feminist, historicist, structuralist and psychoanalytic.

233 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

Reviews

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mill on the Floss:-


Human nature, the author's era, and in particular a corner of the veil over caste system of Europe lifted with the casual reference to the separate churches or chapels for the poor and the gentry - all in all, good.
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Silas Marner:-


The story of two men, and a little girl, and rectitude and values, ethics and right choices, loss and redemption, love and caring and the joy they bring to life.

The wealthy young man married in what moment of temptation is left unsaid, but he did wish to not only keep his family hidden for fear of his society, he was in love with a good young woman, and did not wish to lose her. When the wife turned up in the village and was found dead - due to starvation and cold, having been neglected by the husband - he took the opportunity to say nothing about his connection.

The little child had wandered into the home of a stranger to the village society who had left a traumatic past behind him in the city, where he was persecuted due to his epileptic fits being mislabeled as dealings with devil and he had been thrown out of his work and his life. He had lived for years in the village, but connected with humanity only when he found the child in his home shortly after being robbed of all his money, all his saving, and insisted the child was his to protect and care for.

The father of the child let that be - and so lost the only child he was ever going to have, as it turned out.

Silas Marner gained a life by his act, his choice and his heart's truth in giving love and care to an orphan as he thought the child was. The father of the child lost all but his wealth by deliberately not acclaiming the child he knew was his, and while he married the good woman he loved, he knew he was not good enough for either her or her love, since he was an untruthful unworthy man by virtue of having denied his wife and his child, having neglected one until she died of starvation and cold, and having not claimed the child so she was taken and raised as an orphan by another man, who found the whole village gather round him in the process.

One of the most touching tales about human relationships, mistakes and redemption, crime and sin, fate and choices.

Silas Marner found life, and love of a daughter, with the little girl wandering in and falling asleep at his hearth; it was not his duty but a choice he made to keep the little one he could ill afford. Meanwhile her natural and legal father has refrained from admitting his family, falsified his identity in relation to the family he would not own, for sake of the good young woman he loved, and he lost much in the process of fall from rectitude.
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[Ashley Boyter]

Tragedy n Irony mingled in the quest to do the right thing.