Silas Marner

Silas Marner is a weaver in the small religious community of Lantern Yard, cast out and disgraced when his closest friend William Dane frames him for a theft he did not commit, stealing the congregation's money, letting Silas take the blame, and marrying Silas's fiancee in the process. Silas leaves and settles alone in the village of Raveloe, working his loom and slowly hardening into a miser, hoarding the gold he earns and counting it obsessively each night with no one else in his life to spend it on or share it with. Dunstan Cass, the reckless younger son of the local squire, breaks into Silas's cottage and steals the gold, then vanishes without explanation, leaving Silas bereft a second time. Not long after, on a snowy New Year's Eve, a small child wanders into Silas's cottage after her mother collapses and dies in the snow outside; the child is the secret daughter of Dunstan's older brother Godfrey Cass, born of a marriage Godfrey has never publicly acknowledged, and Silas, with nowhere else for his affection to go, adopts and raises her as Eppie. Sixteen years later, Dunstan's skeleton and the stolen gold are finally found at the bottom of an old stone quarry, and Godfrey, now married and childless, confesses the truth and offers to take Eppie into a more comfortable life. Eppie refuses him without hesitation, choosing the father who actually raised her, and the novel ends with Silas restored, his gold recovered but no longer the point of his life.

Eliot builds the novel almost like a fable, spare and exact rather than sprawling, and the effect is warmer and more direct than her longer novels, a deliberate study of how love, given and returned, does more to remake a ruined man than the gold ever could. It is shorter than most of Eliot's fiction and a good place for a reader intimidated by her longer books to start.

Eppie's name comes from Hephzibah, the name of Silas's own dead mother and sister, a detail Silas reveals only once he has decided to keep her.