APC Silas Marner (With Annotations) for Class 12

Silas Marner was Eliot’s third novel and is among the best known of her works. Many of the novel’s themes and concerns stem from Eliot’s own life experiences. Silas’s loss of religious faith recalls Eliot’s own struggle with her faith, and the novel’s setting in the vanishing English countryside reflects Eliot’s concern that England was fast becoming industrialised and impersonal. The novel’s concern with class and family can likewise be linked back to Eliot’s own life. The voice of the novel’s narrator can thus, to some extent, be seen as Eliot’s own voice—one tinged with slight condescension, but fond of the setting and thoroughly empathetic with the characters. Though Silas Mamer is in a sense a very personal novel for Eliot, its treatment of the themes of faith, family, and class has nonetheless given it universal appeal, especially at the time of publication, when English society and institutions were undergoing rapid change.