"Backgrounds" includes fifteen letters from the 1859-69 period centering on the novel's content and composition; "Brother and Sister" (1869), a little-known sonnet sequence; and eight Victorian reviews and responses, both published and unpublished, on the novel, including those by Henry James, Algernon Charles Swinurne, and John Ruskin Judiciously chosen from the wealth of essays onThe Mill on the Floss published in this century, "Criticism" includes ten of the best studies of the novel, providing the reader with historical and critical perspective. The contributors are Leslie...

After he is wrongly accused of a crime and expelled from his community, weaver Silas Marner becomes a miser and a recluse. A strange sequence of events, and the appearance of a small child, transforms his life in this realistic tale of rural life, and symbolic drama of sin and repentance.

Mary Ann Evans who is better known by her pen name George Eliot was a leading British Victorian novelist. Eliot was known for her realism and keenness in developing psychological plots. Evans decided to write under a male pen name so that her work would be taken seriously. Through her writings the reader is given insight into the character of Eliot and her friends. Eliot covers such topics as: philosophy, national consciousness, self-deception, plagiarism and moral blindness in her works. The Lifted Veil is a dark novel in which the hero has lost his mother at a young age, his father resented...

In 1832, Harold Transome arrives home from the East to inherit the family estate, and startles his family by standing as a Radical candidate. He is well-intentioned but misguided, and his character is contrasted with idealistic artisan, Felix Holt.'

The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by one of the nineteenth century's great novelists. With sympathy, wit, and unflinching realism, Adam Bede tells a story that would have been familiar to Eliot's first readers: the seduction of a pretty farm girl by the young squire of the district. Eliot uses this story, with its tragic implications, to explore the dangers of reliance on religious and social norms to govern destructive desires. As this edition demonstrates, Adam Bede addresses profound questions of morality, religion, and the...

Mary Anne Evans took the pen name George Eliot to prevent her being pigeon-holed as an author of 'light romantic fiction' the only branch of literature open to females in the England of her time. Published in 1861, Eliot uses Silas Marner to skillfully portray the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution, and her own trenchant views on politics, religion and the hypocrisy of the gentry. But in its essence, the book concerns human redemption, telling the tale of an embittered lonely man, crushed by unjust fortune, whose world is utterly changed by his care and love for an orphan child.

Be they shocking, ambitious, or simply brilliant, these novels continue to enthrall today as they did at the time they were written. Now, Penguin Classics is proud to present them in gorgeous clothbound editions-vibrant volumes sure to become as treasured to readers as the magnificent tales they tell.

Falsely accused of theft, Silas Marner is cut off from his community but finds refuge in the village of Raveloe, where he is eyed with distant suspicion. Like a spider from a fairy-tale, Silas fills fifteen monotonous years with weaving and accumulating gold. The son of the wealthy local Squire, Godfrey Cass also seeks an escape from his past. One snowy winter, two events change the course of their lives: Silas's gold is stolen and, a child crawls across his threshold.

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