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Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe, comes alive in this classic novel by George Eliot. Summary of the Book Silas Marner is a weaver and a member of a small Calvinist congregation in a slum street in an unnamed city in Northern England. His life is torn apart when he is falsely accused of filching the congregation’s funds. A pocket-knife and the presence of the bag which once contained the money in his own house point at Silas’ guilt. Yet, there is a chance that Silas has been framed by his best friend, William Dane. However, he bears the brunt of the penalty for the crime and loses everything. He leaves the street and the city to find a new life. At Raveloe, he settles down again, this time hoping to find solace in isolation. All he is interested in are his earnings, his stockpile of gold and his reclusive lifestyle. However, destiny seems to have more misfortune ready for him. In a fateful manner bleak enough to cripple the Biblical Job, Silas loses his gold and falls deeper into melancholy. When he decides to adopt a young baby who wanders into his house from out of the snow, he has no idea how his life is about to change. About George Eliot In a time when success in the world of serious, non-romantic literature was dominated by the gender of the writer, Mary Ann Evans chose to write her now classic novels under the moniker of George Eliot. Her novel, Middlemarch, is largely considered to be one of the greatest novels in English literature. Among her other famous novels are Daniel Deronda, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. Among the several motion picture adaptations of Silas Marner, Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of the weaver in the 1985 BBC TV adaptation and Steve Martin’s adaptation in A Simple Twist of Fate are the best known.