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  • Published: 26 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241422502
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

Silas Marner




Penguin Classics Relaunch.

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Jan Francis, star of Just Good Friends. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by David Carroll.

Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the chance to transform his life. His fate, and that of the little girl he adopts, is entwined with Godfrey Cass, son of the village Squire, who, like Silas, is trapped by his past. Silas Marner, George Eliot's favourite of her novels, combines humour, rich symbolism and pointed social criticism to create an unsentimental but affectionate portrait of rural life.

(c) George Eliot 1861 (P) Penguin Audio 2019

  • Published: 26 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241422502
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

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About the author

George Eliot

Mary Ann (Marian) Evans was born in 1819 in Warwickshire. She attended schools in Nuneaton and Coventry, coming under the influence of evangelical teachers and clergymen. In 1836 her mother died and Marian became her father's housekeeper, educating herself in her spare time. In 1841 she moved to Coventry, and met Charles and Caroline Bray, local progressive intellectuals. Through them she was commissioned to translate Strauss's Life of Jesus and met the radical publisher John Chapman, who, when he purchased the Westminster Review in 1851, made her his managing editor.

Having lost her Christian faith and thereby alienated her family, she moved to London and met Herbert Spencer (whom she nearly married, only he found her too 'morbidly intellectual') and the versatile man-of-letters George Henry Lewes. Lewes was separated from his wife, but with no possibility of divorce. In 1854 he and Marian decided to live together, and did so until Lewes's death in 1878. It was he who encouraged her to turn from philosophy and journalism to fiction, and during those years, under the name of George Eliot, she wrote Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, as well as numerous essays, articles and reviews.

George Eliot died in 1880, only a few months after marrying J. W. Cross, an old friend and admirer, who became her first biographer. She was buried beside Lewes at Highgate. George Eliot combined a formidable intelligence with imaginative sympathy and acute powers of observation, and became one of the greatest and most influential of English novelists. Her choice of material widened the horizons of the novel and her psychological insights radically influenced the novelist's approach to characterization. Middlemarch, considered by most to be her masterpiece, was said by Virginia Woolf to be 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.

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Praise for Silas Marner

Spellbinding.

Daily Telegraph

Pullman's writing is spellbinding, his storytelling brilliant.

Scotsman

A stunning, dense and deep novel . . . funny and unquenchably imaginative.

Observer

His Dark Materials wasn't just the best children's book - it was also the most interesting fictional experiment of our times.

Reader's Digest

An eye-widening fantasy, a scorching thriller and a thought-provoking reflection on the human condition, this is a book that can be enjoyed at many levels.

Guardian