George Eliot’s short novel, Silas Marner, reads like a parable or a fairy tale – uplifting, redemptive, a little sad.  When the novel opens, Silas is a young man who has been swept up into a closed religious community – Lantern Yard – in his hometown.  He is happy and content, with a fiance he loves, a pastor he trusts, and a best friend from whom he is inseparable – until he loses it all to a false accusation of theft.  Bereft of his love and driven out of his community, Silas wanders until he loses himself in a small community called Raveloe, where he sets up as a weaver in an isolated cottage.  The villagers view Silas – pale, nearsighted, with a tendency to fall into trances – with suspicion and a great deal of fear.

When Silas is engaged to weave for a local resident and receives his first payment, he cleaves to the money – having lost everything that matters to him.  Silas is unused to having money to call his own; nearly all of his wages used to be paid to his religious community.  He begins to hoard the payments he receives for his work, and because he is an excellent weaver, his money stash grows and grows – until the day that he is robbed.

Silas’s loss has the unexpected result of bringing him closer to the community.  After living on the outside looking in, Silas finds himself an object of sympathy, and the villagers’ curiosity about him takes a more gentle turn.  But the true change comes one day when Silas loses himself in a trance, only to find a golden-haired toddler on his hearth.  The nearsighted Silas imagines, at first, that the heap of gold he sees is his money returned to him; when he gets a closer look and discovers that it’s actually a little girl, he is smitten.

Marner took her on his lap, trembling with an emotion mysterious to himself, at something unknown dawning on his life.  Thought and feeling were so confused within him, that if he had tried to give them utterance, he could only have said that the child was come instead of the gold – that the gold had turned into the child.  He took the garments from Dolly, and put them on under her teaching; interrupted, of course, by Baby’s gymnastics.

The baby’s mother has frozen to death in the road outside Silas’s door, so Silas adopts the little one and names her Eppie.  With his decision to take Eppie to his heart, the villagers’ goodwill – which was already flowing into Silas’s little cottage – overflows.  Eppie connects Silas to his neighbors, and the whole town is irrevocably changed.

Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude – which was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tones – Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her.  The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward, and carried them far away from their old eager pacing towards the same blank limit – carried them away to the new things that would come with the coming years, when Eppie would have learned to understand how her father Silas cared for her; and made him look for images of that time in the ties and charities that bound together the families of the neighbours.  The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening his senses with her fresh life, even to the old winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early spring sunshine, and warming him into her joy because she had joy.

Silas Marner started slow for me, and some of the scenes – especially a long scene in the local pub, the Rainbow, during which peripheral characters spent two chapters discoursing over something irrelevant – made me think that Eliot may have originally intended a longer, more developed story, more Middlemarch-ian in scope.  In the end, I’m glad Eliot focused on the pared-down story of Silas, Eppie, and their connection to the local squire’s family.  This core of the novel was the most interesting and moving part, and the narrative really picked up steam when Eppie arrived on the scene and the village started to open its heart to Silas.

The one thing that I found really distracting about the book was the constant description of Silas as being nearsighted, groping around and practically blind.  I know that he was supposed to seem like a mole or some other underground creature – symbolism, y’all.  But all I could think was – I know glasses existed in Victorian times, and the village had a doctor (he appears in several scenes).  Why did no one suggest that Silas wear glasses?

That’s a minor gripe, though.  Altogether, I loved Silas Marner.  I found it sweet, sad, and profoundly moving.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction.  We see no white-winged angels now.  But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently toward a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a child’s.