Silas Marner and Two Short Stories

From George Levine's Introduction toSilas Marner and Two Short Stories Of all George Eliot's novels,Silas Marner(1861) is the shortest and perhaps the most accessible to modern readers. That is partly because it is the only one of her novels that has the atmosphere of a fable, and indeed seems to have been deliberately written as one. The very qualities of apparent simplicity, clarity, and directness that have always made it among the most popular of her novels have also made it seem as though it is not quite as serious, not quite as "real" as the other much longer and more complex works, most notablyMiddlemarch(1872), universally recognized as her masterpiece and arguably the greatest nineteenth-century English novel. Unusual as it seems, among Eliot's other more imposing works,Silas Marneris not as atypical as it at first appears to be. In fact, no book of Eliot's gives more immediate access to the mysteries of her art, or rather, to the central preoccupations, formal and thematic, that determine the shape and style of her novels, and to the difficulties and potential contradictions they confront.Silas Marner, for all its fairy-tale aspects, is also a "realistic" novel, firmly set in time and place, sharply observed, focused not on the extraordinary, but on the everyday. And just asSilas Marnerhas elements of realism, so the larger works reveal elements of the kind of fable we find here. It does not take very close reading (which every book of George Eliot always deserves and requires) to detect the "fabulous" qualities behind the massive and complex structures of her more evidently realistic work: There is more than a touch of the legendary inRomola(1863, written just afterSilas Marner), and even inMiddlemarch, where fable is more elaborately disguised, and certainly in her last great work,Daniel Deronda(1877).Silas Marner, then, is interestingly representative of the work of one of the greatest of nineteenth-century novelists, at the same time as it is satisfyingly brief, precisely constructed, and yet full of the intelligence and circumstantial precision that mark all of Eliot's earlier fiction. The great late books struggleusually brilliantly, sometimes with "the odor of the lamp" upon them, as Henry James complainedto get the details of context right and full. The very abundance of contextual detail, of plot and of character, complicates and largely disguises the directness of the moral passion that drives them. George Eliot, a novelist with a moral mission, was too wise to think that morality was a simple matter of right and wrong. And yet, whileSilas Marneris brilliantly crafted, it gives off an air of spontaneity and ease that her contemporaries greatly admired (and they often complained that the later novels had lost just that sense of spontaneity as they grew more apparently solemn and philosophical). While all of Eliot's fiction (except for the remarkable short story "The Lifted Veil," included in this volume) are written from the point of view of a sage narrator who does not often hesitate to intrude and comment on the action,Silas Marner's narrator is quite restrained, although also notably learned and sophisticated. Her eye is on the action, and for the most part, she simply tells the story, swiftly and efficiently, commenting on it only occasionally, though pithily. Throughout her career, Eliot was committed, as she claimed, to keep her stories from lapsing from REliot, George is the author of 'Silas Marner and Two Short Stories ', published 2005 under ISBN 9781593082512 and ISBN 1593082517.