Rating: 
Summary: This may be a sleeper, but it has a good message
Review: I especially liked the discussions of how religon can interfere with being a good person if one is not careful. Overall, it is kind of boring, but the touching message is nice.
Rating: 
Summary: Ugh!
Review: This is the worst book I have ever read. I picked it up and started reading, since I'd heard so many good things about it. After about 10 minutes, I found myself turning pages without reading or even skimming them. The characters are completely un-lifelike. The plot is terribly boring. No one should be with this dreadful book.
Rating: 
Summary: A thoughtful comment on Silas Marner
Review: Silas Marner is a classic Eliot tale which combines comments on morality and religion in a fascinating narrative of life in England during the HeyDay of artisan industry.
Truly a story which is as effective in commenting on the religious quandries of a man whose honesty and integrity were not believed by a church hierachy as it is on the everyday affections of a father and his daughter. Silas is a modern-day tragic hero, with a twist; his tragedy is turned into a fairytale wonder, and the rich nobility of
the Cass family (the local Squierarchy) have tragedy and sadness.
This book is important reading for anyone interested in starting out with Eliot, and more so as a powerful and moving story from which everyone can learn! Silas is not a book which will simply be read once. You will want this hard cover edition to keep in a prominent place on your library shelf so that you'll be able to read
it time and time again without damage!
Have fun and enjoy.
Phillip Miller
Rating:
Summary: Classic Tale of Redemption
Review: This is an odd little book, but it's a good one. It's odd because the famous story of the old miser who is redeemed by taking in an angelic little girl to raise doesn't really even begin until half-way through the novel. This was definitely a surprise to me, but it wasn't a bad one. It ends up that there is a lot more to this novel than I thought there would be. In that first half of the novel, George Eliot brilliantly elucidates the fallen nature of both Silas Marner and the community. They're are revealed to be such selfish and sinful people. They are all in the throws of despair, lamenting their plight as humans and questioning a God who placed them in their lives. Eliot is really wonderful at capturing the need of each individual for redemption and also that need in the community as a whole. The individuals are criticized as is the unfair societal structure. Into this fallen world comes the angelic Eppie, and that's when the story really picks up. Eppie is the catalyst of grace offering redemption to Silas and the rest of the community.
Silas Marner is really an extraordinary little novel. It's a thoroughly enjoyable book (especially after you get through the first half) with a lot of valid criticism and some hope. It's a really beautiful little classic.
Rating:
Summary: Faith
Review: SILAS MARNER/ By George Eliot/ David Campbell Publishers Ltd. *****
What is faith? Faith can be something one believes in without knowing if it is really there. In the novel Silas Marner, George Eliot makes clear how a weaver loses faith in God. The weaver [Silas Marner] regains belief when he finds a little girl around the age of two wondering around his cottage. He raises her [Eppie] and becomes very close to her. While raising Eppie, Silas takes her to church to be raised and taught like a Christian. This novel has a great shift when his love for Eppie starts changing his personality. George Eliot describes Silas's as a person with no hope. He describes the lost of devotion when his best friend steals a bag of money from a dying man. His best friend then blames it on him. The decision was left to God; whether or not he was to blame. This method convicted Silas, which is when he decided to loose all his faith. Silas hesitates when he finds out that Eppie is Godfrey's daughter.
Sometimes having faith can help people continue their daily activities. This novel is really captivating, and interesting. It can make you understand the different ways in which God protects his children. When Silas was to busy avoiding confrontation with God, God put Eppie on his path. If you are a person in need of finding yourself it would be a great idea to read this novel. It focuses in the struggles one has throughout their lives. The many obstacles one will have to go through to know that at end everything will be alright. Sometimes it helps to know that there is someone waiting for you on the other side. This novel's rating is a five because it captivates the readers mind.
Rating:
Summary: Read before you judge
Review: Silas Marner by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Evans, is a well-written story, made more so by the fact it was written by a woman in the Victorian Age. The novel is set in the early nineteenth century England, during a time that society had three distinct classes: the rich and powerful, the working people, and the tradesmen.
While the characters personalities in the book seem exaggerated to make there qualities or faults more obvious, Eliot's detailed descriptions of the people made it easy to create a mental picture of them. Though the book is well written, the style of language makes it hard to read and even harder to understand. I found I had to read it more then once and spend time thinking it through to get to the point of enjoying it. Silas Marner has many valuable moral and lessons in it, the most important one being that people are worth more than gold.
Rating:
Summary: A truly wonderful little story!
Review: Silas Marner is a wonderful story about life and love. It begins with our hero, Silas Marner, a lonely, luckless old man, being robbed of his life savings. But then a mysterious appearance of a homeless, golden-haired little girl opens up an unexpected new chapter in his life. Silas Marner was a weaver who through loneliness and through life's occurrences becomes bitter and miserly. The theft of his life savings causes him to rethink everything about his life. Ms. Eliot also introduces Godfrey Cass to her cast of characters. Godfrey is a foil to Silas. He is the real father of Eppie, the young girl that Silas adopts. We watch as Silas' lot and outlook on life improve, Godfrey's life dissolves into disappointment, fear and guilt. The book is not "preachy", but a reader cannot help but be improved by reading and learning the moral lessons that it delivers.
Rating:
Summary: Pure gold
Review: If you have a heart, the story of Silas Marner will warm it. You are better coming to it fresh, without knowing anything of the simple yet solid plot, so I will say nothing of it. I will just urge you to read this wonderful book. Eliot writes beautifully and from page one, you realize you are in the hands of a true artist. This is a very human, very English story of simple people living through those very basic emotions that make the world turn and give the universe meaning.
Rating:
Summary: A classic story of the redemptive power of love
Review: Like so many other American high- schoolers I with great difficulty went through this work. Years later I subjected one of my children to the same ordeal when she needed to write a book- report. And this because I found then and now, this moral tale of redemptive love to be moving and instructional. For young people and I expect for most readers today the complexity of Eliot's language is an obstacle to be overcome. She writes the kind of sentences the masters of style have been teaching Americans not to write for years. But she writes with great intelligence and intuition, great moral feeling. The story of the weaver unjustly accused of a robbery, who retreats into his own private world and who is later redeemed by his meeting and taking care of an orphan child is one which cannot help but touch the heart. And as Hawthorne said when the heart is touched we begin to be .And this work comes alive with the old codger's care for and love of the orphan child. Like Scrooge the other great scowling isolato of nineteenth century Literature he exemplifies and proves the greatest moral lesson of all, that in loving and caring for other human beings we become human ourselves.
Who can make it through the difficult language will find not only a very detailed and convincing description of English village life in the early nineteenth century but also a warm tale of the human heart healing itself through love.
Rating:
Summary: Simple and fairly ineffective.
Review: This is the first book I read by George Eliot and it may well be the last. I thought it would serve as a good intro into her work but the novel was far too simple in prose and spirit. While there is nothing wrong with the story of spiritual rebirth that's all it adds up to - a story. For me the definition of great literature is not just a good story but something which takes advantage of the art of writing by plumbing into the heart of humanity and translating it so the reader can feel what has been written. To put it simply, great literature can not be translated into a movie without losing what made it so great. This book can be easily translated into a movie as there is not much going on outside of the story. No deep character analysis, no discourse on anything really outside physical perception. From the plot the book should have been a very emotional read but it wasn't. Eliot's prose wouldn't allow it. She really serves as an outsider looking on these characters and situations rather then someone intimately familiar with the emotions and thoughts which make up the themes of the book. So, in turn, I felt like an outsider reading it. This would make a good movie where the story and physical emotion are the most important aspects, but as a novel it doesn't do the craft justice. In terms of English Victorian era literature Silas Marner just can't compare to novels by the likes of Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte.
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