"Cliff Notes - Silas Marner" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

sisters had signed male pen names to their novels Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights.)

Although George Eliot's first stories were well reviewed, her
first full-length novel, Adam Bede, was a runaway success. Set
in the Warwickshire countryside where Marian had grown up, it
vibrated with a simple realism totally new in English
literature. No one before had cast ordinary farm laborers as
main characters in a novel, or had drawn such complex
psychological portraits of them. What's more, the book's plot
centered around a farm girl's seduction and her murder of her
illegitimate child. Even without Marian Evans' name attached,
this was racy stuff.

By 1860, George Eliot was a famous, beloved author. Yet
Marian Evans was still a social outcast, and it began to weigh
on her. Her first novels sold well, but she and Lewes weren't
rich. (He still had to support his wife and her children.) If
anything, success only increased the pressure Marian put on
herself to write an even better book next time. Although the
public loved her realistic stories of English rustic life,
Marian was afraid of getting stuck in a rut, and so she planned
a new novel set in Renaissance Italy. But the heavy research it
required was bogging her down. Lewes needed to stay in London
for his journalistic work. They lived there in a dumpy rented
house, surrounded by the gray cityscape. Marian felt cooped up,
stifled, cut off from her roots in the country.

Then a vision came to her out of her childhood. It was a
picture of an old linen-weaver, with a sad expression on his
face, bent under the heavy bag on his shoulder. Floodgates of
feeling opened in her. She postponed the Italian novel and
began to write Silas Marner.

Contemporary readers were delighted with Silas Marner because
it returned to the rustic characters they'd enjoyed in Adam
Bede. Yet Silas Marner was really a step forward. Behind this
simple portrait of country life lies a rigorous examination of
the moral forces that drive the universe. Marian believed that
writers should not merely entertain the public, but that they
had a duty to teach their readers moral truths as well. Having
lost her Christian faith, she'd replaced it with a philosophy
that kindness, honesty, and courage were necessary for human
survival, an ethical code that runs throughout Silas Marner.
She continued to explore this creed in her later novels, Felix
Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda.

Eventually, the greatness of George Eliot's work cancelled
out her social disgrace. Even Queen Victoria's daughter begged
to meet her. Marian and Lewes remained devoted to each other