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

for twenty-five years, and this finally won them as much respect
as if they'd been legally married. In fact, after Lewes' death
in 1878, when Marian married a much younger man, John Cross,
many of her fans were upset. They felt she was being disloyal
to Lewes' memory.

In her own time, George Eliot was the most popular author in
Britain, more admired even than Dickens, in spite of her
notorious personal life. Her literary reputation dipped for
several years after her death in 1880, however, as the public
taste moved away from long, moralizing novels. Her focus on
characters' psychological processes had paved the way for the
"modern novel" (both Henry James and Marcel Proust claimed a
debt to her), but the experimental fiction of the early
twentieth century made her prose style seem old-fashioned. Then
one of the chief experimentalists, Virginia Woolf, helped to
restore Eliot's reputation. She wrote an essay praising
Middlemarch as "one of the few books written for adults." Eliot
has been considered one of the great writers ever since.

Among her novels, Silas Marner is most often chosen for
students to read because it is the shortest and, on the surface,
the simplest. But it, too, is full of adult wisdom. Though its
social philosophies may no longer seem as radical as they did a
century ago, this is still an eye-opening, truthful vision of
the way the world works.

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SILAS MARNER: THE PLOT

Silas Marner, a linen-weaver, works in his solitary cottage
by a stone-pit outside the English village of Raveloe. In a
flashback, you learn that Marner came to Raveloe fifteen years
earlier from a large industrial town where he was part of a
fundamentalist Christian sect. But one night, Silas had fallen
into a trance while watching over the deathbed of a church
elder. Silas' best friend stole a bag of money from the dying
man and blamed the theft on Silas. Their sect tried the case by
drawing lots, to let God show who was guilty. When this method
convicted Silas, he lost his faith in God and soon left the
city. Ending up in Raveloe, he kept to himself and worked long
hours. Slowly he began to accumulate gold, and this became his
one purpose in life.

Godfrey Cass, son of the village squire, at this time needs
money. His younger brother Dunstan has borrowed a large sum
from Godfrey and now he's lost it. But the money belongs to
their father, and Godfrey has to repay it himself. Otherwise
Dunstan will tell their father Godfrey's secret--that he's
married to a drug-addicted barmaid. Godfrey gives his favorite