Tag: Silas Marner

Spell the Month in Books – September 2026

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months have additional themes, but feel free to participate however you’d like!

Currently Jana is not assigning themes, so for September I’ve chosen to feature some of the Classic books that I have read. The links in the titles of each book go to my posts, where they exist.

The more Spell the Month books I do, the harder it becomes to use book titles beginning with the letter E as I prefer to use ones I haven’t already used in earlier posts – but I have managed it this time. I think the last three months of the year will be challenging!

S is for Silas Marner by George Eliot, set in the early years of the 19th century (Eliot was writing the book in 1861) 

The story revolves around Silas Marner, a weaver living in Raveloe, a village on the brink of industrialisation. He was wrongly accused of theft and left his home town to live a lonely and embittered life in Raveloe where he became a miser, hoarding his gold and counting it each night. Until one night his life is changed by the theft of his money and a little girl who came to live with him, having been abandoned in the snow.

It took me a while to settle into George Eliot’s style of writing, with her long, long sentences – some so long I had forgotten how they had started, before I got to the end. But once my mind had adjusted to the rhythm of her writing I enjoyed this short book 

E is for Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, first published in 1911 this is in contrast to some of her other books about the New York society of the 1870s to 1920s. It’s a rural tragedy of inevitable suffering and sadness that reminded me of Thomas Hardy’s books.

It’s a beautifully told tale – a tragedy, signalled right from the beginning of the book, when the unnamed narrator first saw Ethan Frome and was told he had been disfigured and crippled in a ‘smash up’, twenty four years earlier. Life had not been good to him.

I enjoyed it very much.  As well as striking and memorable characters the setting is  beautifully described – a ‘mute and melancholy landscape, an incarceration of frozen woe‘, in the isolated village of Starkfield (a fictional New England village). Even though Ethan Frome is a tragedy there is light to contrast the darkness, and there is love and hope set against repression and misery. I hoped the ending would be a happy one, although I knew it couldn’t be. 


P is for The Power-House by John Buchan, written in 1913 when it was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine and then published in book form in 1916.

Buchan tells a good story, even if I had little idea what the Power-House really was. It’s an international anarchist network, but who they were, what they were actually after, or how they hoped to achieve their ends was never clear to me. But I really enjoyed this book. As Stella Rimington says it has an ‘intoxicating blend of madness with scents of home and countryside.’ 

It has some interesting thoughts on the nature of civilisation, and of power and comments on the ‘the business of Government. When all is said, we are ruled by amateurs and the second-rate. The methods of our departments would bring any private firm to bankruptcy. The methods of Parliament – pardon me – would disgrace any board of directors.’

T is for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, first published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell.

I read this years ago before I began blogging, so I have no record of what I thought of it, other than that I loved it.

In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a ‘wicked woman’ as the local gossips would have it, but as the estranged wife of a brutal alcoholic bully, desperate to protect her son. Using her own experiences with her brother Branwell to depict the cruelty and debauchery from which Helen flees, Anne Brontë wrote her masterpiece to reflect the fragile position of women in society and her belief in universal redemption, but scandalized readers of the time.

E is for East of Eden by John Steinbeck, first published in 1952.

This is the story of two family, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, whose generations helplessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. I enjoyed this beautifully written book, which begins slowly, but not as much as The Grapes of Wrath, which I thought was amazing. It’s long – too long really – and to my mind it reads like a morality tale of good versus evil. There are many parallels to the Bible stories, with surely one of the most evil characters ever in Cathy. I liked the way Steinbeck set out the moral dilemmas and gave the characters personal choice using the Hebrew word ‘timshel‘, meaning ‘thou mayest’.

M is for Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

On the surface this is a simple story about a family and their relationships. Fanny Price, as a child of 10 goes to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram at Mansfield Park, where as the poor relation she is not treated badly, but not as cared for or as kindly as her cousins, but more as an unpaid servant dependent on the family for her welfare – a sort of Cinderella story. But through the story, Jane Austen reveals the complicated interaction of society, shows the development of Fanny’s character and the depiction of a heroine who is good and gentle who matures throughout the novel. 

It’s full of detail of everyday life, its boredom as well as its entertainments and pleasures, the  balls and dinners. There is much in it about the houses and gardens, not only of the wealthy but also of the lower classes, such as Fanny’s parents home in Portsmouth – but they have servants themselves, so it is only comparative poverty. Seen mainly through Fanny’s eyes, it’s a study of morals, the damage caused by being unwanted and unloved. There is also a gentle strain of humour and satirical observations about contemporary values, and even, with Mary Crawford’s pun on ‘Rears and Vices‘, a bawdy note.

B is for Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, first published in 1841, a murder mystery as well as a historical novel, mainly concerning the events surrounding the Gordon Riots of 1780. It’s almost a book of two parts and the dramatic second half, to my mind, more than makes up for the slow beginning which I had to read slowly and carefully.

It begins in 1775, five years before the riots as a group of customers in the Maypole Inn in the village of Chigwell, on the borders of Epping Forest and about 112 miles from London, recollect the murder of Reuben Haredale, the owner of The Warren, 22 years earlier to the day. His steward, a Mr Rudge was found months later, stabbed to death.The murderer had never been discovered. Reuben’s brother Geoffrey had lived at The Warren with his niece, Emma ever since.

From then on the book becomes much more complicated with many characters and sub-plots. There are a number of themes running through the novel – the relationship between fathers and sons, the position of authority, justice and the question of punishment for crime, and religious conflict. Dickens paints a picture of London, the dirt and poverty, the terrible condition of the roads, the perils of footpads and highwaymen which is in contrast to the countryside that still at that period surrounded London making it a cleaner, purer place to live in.

E is for Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, first published in 1952. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is most entertaining, subtly and gently comic.  laugh-out-loud funny, but it is most entertaining, subtly and gently comic.

It’s set just after the end of the Second World War, about the everyday life of Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried woman – in other words a spinster – in her early 30s. The daughter of a clergyman she is one of those ‘excellent women’ who could be relied upon to help out at Church jumble sales, garden fêtes, to make tea when required or to make up numbers at social gatherings. She finds herself involved in the quarrel between her new neighbours, Helena and Rockingham (Rocky) Napier, a married couple who live in the flat below her, as well as in the difficult relationship between Julian Mallory, the local vicar and his unmarried sister, when he finds himself trapped by Allegra Grey, a vivacious widow when she moves into their spare room. It’s a slow-paced book but all the better because of that.

R is for A Room with a View by E M Forster. First published in 1908, this is a novella of 161 pages, a comedy of manners, satirising the manners and social conventions of Victorian/Edwardian society. It is about a young woman, Lucy Honeychurch, and her journey to self-discovery as she breaks out of the restrained culture of Edwardian England. It’s also a romance.

It begins in Florence where Lucy is staying at the Pensione Bertolini, with her older cousin and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett. They meet two other guests, a Mr Emerson and his son George who are not bound by the conventions of the day and Charlotte considers they are ill-bred. But Lucy is attracted by the Emersons’ free thinking ideas. They spend time in Florence visiting various locations including the Santa Croce church, the Piazza Della Signoria and the San Miniato church, with its beautiful facade, and take a trip into the hills.

The second half of the book takes place in England at Lucy’s home at Windy Corner where we meet the rest of her family and Lucy has to decide between the insufferable Cecil and the unconventional George. 

Classic Club Spin: Silas Marner by George Eliot

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

 

The back cover of my Penguin Popular Classics edition of Silas Marner tells me it was George Eliot’s own favourite novel. The story revolves around Silas Marner, a weaver living in Raveloe, a village on the brink of industrialisation. He was wrongly accused of theft and left his home town to live a lonely and embittered life in Raveloe where he became a miser, hoarding his gold and counting it each night. Until one night his life is changed by the theft of his money and a little girl who came to live with him, having been abandoned in the snow.

It took me a while to settle into George Eliot’s style of writing, with her long, long sentences – some so long I had forgotten how they had started, before I got to the end. But once my mind had adjusted to the rhythm of her writing I enjoyed this short book (221 pages in my copy). It’s set in the early years of the 19th century (she was writing the book in 1861) and begins with a description of linen weavers and the superstition that surrounded them. They were:

… pallid undersized men, who by the side of brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. The shepherd’s dog barked fiercely when one of these alien-looking men appeared on the upland, dark against the early winter sunset; for what dog likes a figure bent under a heavy bag? – and these pale men rarely stirred abroad without that mysterious burden.

In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted … no one knew where wandering men had their homes, or their origin … to peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery … (page 9)

There are two strands to the storyline – one about Silas and the other about Godfrey Cass, two very different men, one poor, a social outcast and the other rich, the son of the local squire. They move in very different social circles, the Cass family life is one of lazy indulgence, but their lives intersect through the arrival of the little girl.

I really enjoyed this short book, bringing to life a world that had disappeared by the time George Eliot was writing it. It has the touch of a fairytale about it, or of a folk myth, and it tells of the consequences of our actions. The characters come to life through Eliot’s descriptions and I could easily picture their appearance and hear their speech. For example

She actually said “mate” for “meat”, “appen” for “perhaps”, and “oss” for “horse”, which, to young ladies living in good Lytherly society, who habitually said ‘orse, even in domestic privacy, and only said ‘appen’ on the right occasions, was necessarily shocking. (page 113)

I wondered whether this would be a sentimental tale, but although it is touching it isn’t sentimental. In the end it’s about a world of uncertainties, of ways of looking at life, of the nature of belief and religion and of the possibilities of change. And it does have a happy ending.

As well as being my Classics Club Spin book it’s also one of my TBRs, qualifying for the Mount TBR Reading challenge.

The Classics Club Spin Result

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

The result of the Classics Club Spin is No. 1 which for me is Silas Marner by George Eliot. I am so pleased – I wanted a short book and lo and behold this is a short book!

Although the shortest of George Eliot’s novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner – a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England – and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.

Silas Marner is a tender and moving tale of sin and repentance set in a vanished rural world and holds the reader’s attention until the last page as Eppie’s bonds of affection for Silas are put to the test.

First published in 1861 as Silas Marner: the Weaver of Raveloe, George Eliot described it as ‘a story of old-fashioned English life’.

Choosing a Classic

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

It’s time I began reading another classic for the Classics Challenge. I thought I’d look at the openings of some to see which takes my fancy.

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell:

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next room – a certain Betty, whose slumbers must not be disturbed until six o’clock struck, when she awakened herself ‘as sure as clockwork’, and left the household very little peace afterwards.

It reminds me of the children’s song Old MacDonald had a Farm with its repetitions. The little girl is Molly Gibson and Betty with the unseen powers is the family’s servant. It promises a story of a family and Molly’s place within it and this opening interests me. I don’t know anything about the book and have not seen any of the TV adaptations, so I’m coming to it with a completely open mind – no other interpretations to influence my reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s words.

Silas Marner by George Eliot:

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses – and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak – there might be seen, in districts far away from the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

This one looks good too about village/rural life at the beginning of the 19th century. The only book by George Eliot that I’ve read is Middlemarch, which I loved. You have to have time and patience to read her books. Silas Marner, however, is a much shorter book with less characters than Middlemarch.

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome:

There were four of us – George and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were – bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.

We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it.

Yet another author I know nothing about and as for the book I only know it’s reckoned to be a comedy. Again I have very few preconceptions about this book and have no ideas about the characters or what happens. I think Montmorency may be a dog as the book’s full title is Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog).

Now I just have to decide which one to read.