Silas Marner is a short novel about a linen weaver who, wrongly accused by his religious community, leaves his home town and settles in the village of Raveloe. There he lives alone, working constantly and finding comfort only in the gold he earns. His quiet, closed-off life is disturbed by a theft and then by the unexpected arrival of a child. Alongside his story runs that of a local landowner's family and its secrets. The book is a warm, moral tale about isolation, community, chance and the healing power of love.
Quotes
He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.
He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark.
Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?
the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families . . .