Silas Marner - Eliot, George

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Résumé :
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 women. With its happy ending and suffusion of fairy-tale elements, Silas Marner marks a turning point in her career. Alongside this development, however, the novel continues to raise Eliot's characteristic questions about social inequalities, the effects of extreme religion, and the worth of human experience....

Biographie:
George Eliot (Marian/Mary Ann Evans) was born in Warwickshire England in 1819. She went on to become one of England's most astute nineteenth century writers. Eliot is the author of celebrated novels including Adam Bede (1859), Middlemarch (1871-1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). She also published non-fiction essays, poems and short stories, and was a skilled translator of German-language philosophy, including works by Strauss, Feuerbach and Spinoza. Eliot's writing is characterised by gritty realism entwined with deep empathy and keen insight into human life and ethics.

Sommaire:
Born Mary Ann Evans on November 22, 1819, in Nuneaton, England, George Eliot was a pioneering novelist, poet, and journalist. Despite little formal schooling, she had access to the Arbury Hall library through her father's work, fueling her intellectual growth. This early exposure to literature and philosophy shaped her future writing.In 1851, Evans moved to London and became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a major intellectual journal. She formed a partnership with critic George Henry Lewes, living with him despite social conventions. To ensure her fiction was taken seriously, she adopted the pen name George Eliot.Her novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Middlemarch (1871-72), are praised for their realism and psychological depth. She explored rural life, human relationships, and moral struggles with great insight. Eliot died on December 22, 1880, leaving a lasting mark on Victorian literature....