Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe is the third novel penned by George Eliot, a pseudonym for Victorian author Mary Anne Evans, first published in England in 1861. It is a dramatic tale of a reclusive weaver, which in strong realism depicts the author's sophisticated treatments of her attitude toward religion. In a script set in the early 19th century, Silas Marner is a member of a small Calvinist congregation in Lantern Yard, a slum street in an unnamed city in the North of England. He is falsely accused of stealing the congregation's funds while caring for a very ill deacon. A pocket-knife...

Cambridge Literature is a series of literary texts edited for study by students aged 14-18 in English-speaking classrooms. It will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, travel-writing and other non-fiction. The series will be extensive and open-ended and will provide school students with a range of edited texts taken from a wide geographical spread. It will feature writing in English from various genres and differing times. Silas Marner by George Eliot is edited by Mary Bousted of the University of York.

In her third novel, reissued here in its first edition of 1861, George Eliot (1819 80) charts the life of the cataleptic, miserly weaver Silas Marner. Arriving in insular Raveloe after a wrongful expulsion from his Calvinist community in the north, Silas is a foreign and outcast figure, left alone to accumulate a useless fortune through his loom in the dawn of the new industrial age. His unhappy life is rendered unrecognisable when his fortune is stolen and he adopts a child. Eliot's first two novels, Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss, had dealt with tragedy and the injustices faced by fallen...

In her third novel, reissued here in its first edition of 1861, George Eliot (1819 80) charts the life of the cataleptic, miserly weaver Silas Marner. Arriving in insular Raveloe after a wrongful expulsion from his Calvinist community in the north, Silas is a foreign and outcast figure, left alone to accumulate a useless fortune through his loom in the dawn of the new industrial age. His unhappy life is rendered unrecognisable when his fortune is stolen and he adopts a child. Eliot's first two novels, Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss, had dealt with tragedy and the injustices faced by fallen...

When the weaver Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he becomes a miser and vows to turn his back on the world. However, the arrival of a tiny child in his cottage melts his heart and changes his life.

Gwendolen Harleth is poised at the roulette-table, prepared to throw away her family fortune. She is observed by Daniel Deronda, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of the English upper-classes. And while Gwendolen loses everything and becomes trapped in an oppressive marriage, Deronda's fortunes take a different turn.

When the young nobleman Harold Transome returns to England from the colonies with a self-made fortune, he scandalizes the town of Treby Magna with his decision to stand for Parliament as a radical. But after Felix Holt also returns to the town, the difference between Harold's opportunistic values and Holts beliefs becomes apparent.

One of George Eliot's most ambitious and imaginative novels, Romola is set in Renaissance Florence during the turbulent years following the expulsion of the powerful Medici family during which the zealous religious reformer Savonarola rose to control the city. At its heart is Romola, the devoted daughter of a blind scholar, married to the clever but ultimately treacherous Tito whose duplicity in both love and politics threatens to destroy everything she values, and she must break away to find her own path in life. Described by Eliot as 'written with my best blood', the story of Romola's...

'Many men write well and tell a story well, but few possess the art of giving individuality to their characters so happily and easily as you ...'

Wrote the publisher John Blackwood in February 1857 to a shy and ambitious new author, whom he had not yet met, George Eliot. Shielded by this pseudonymn, Mary Ann Evans made her fictional debut when Scenes of Clerical Life appeared in Blackwood's Magazine the same year. These are Eliot's earliest studies of what became enduring themes: the impact of religious controversy and social change in provincial life, and the power of love to transform...

Carpenter Adam Bede is in love with the beautiful Hetty Sorrel, but unknown to him, he has a rival, in the local squire's son Arthur Donnithorne. Hetty is soon attracted by Arthur's seductive charm and they begin to meet in secret. The relationship is to have tragic consequences that reach far beyond the couple themselves, touching not just Adam Bede, but many others, not least, pious Methodist Preacher Dinah Morris. A tale of seduction, betrayal, love and deception, the plot of Adam Bede has the quality of an English folk song. Within the setting of Hayslope, a small, rural community, Eliot...