Explore George Eliots interest in human nature as shown by her approach and interests in Silas Marner

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English Pre-Pose 1914 - Silas Marner Assignment

Explore George Eliot’s interest in human nature as shown by her approach and interests in Silas Marner

   This novel explores the issues of love, the view of community, the role of religion, and the status of the upper class and family. In Silas Marner there are many characters that get what they deserve and it is destiny for them to have what is coming to them. Many of the characters ways are changed due to events that happen and how they reacted to their situations. ‘What comes around goes around,’ is a main theme portrayed by George Eliot. The people of Raveloe are portrayed by the author George Eliot in the novel. In different situations they react in their own special way, this in the future is affected by their actions. George Eliot was the fake name of Mary Ann Evans. She gave herself a male name because women were regarded as unqualified of writing a serious novel and it would cause the public problems and so Mary Ann Evans gave herself the name of George Eliot in order to be taken seriously. In the future they discovered that she wrote the novels as the mysterious writer. The genre of Silas Marner is that it is a Victorian novel; it is also a rural fiction novel that explains. It is a novel of manners. The novel was written in Victorian times and was based in Victorian times. It gave an effect how life was back then and how people over the years change and women and men changed their attitudes to each other. It shows the differences between the rich and the poor. The differences show that although working and not as wealthy as others but they can still have good things happen to them. The wealthy can mostly control what they want but in the end they are not happy. Silas Marner was written in 1861, which was in the middle of the Victorian period, is different in George Eliot's novels. The story of Silas Marner can reflect back to George Eliot’s life.

   George Eliot was the fake name of Mary Ann Evans, born in 1819 in Warwickshire, England. She was sent to boarding school, where she developed a strong religious faith, deeply influenced by her preacher. After her mother's death, Mary Ann Evans moved with her father to the city of Coventry. There she met Charles and Caroline Bray, who were intelligent, who led her to question her faith. In 1842 she stopped going to church and after she stopped believing it affected her relationship with her father. Mary Ann Evans became familiar with Charles and Caroline Bray’s ways in Coventry and they broadened her mind beyond an average human. After she travelled to Geneva and then to London. She then became a writer travelling from places to places. The publication of her first collection of stories in 1857, under the false name of George Eliot, brought immediate praise from critics. Although they got reports from critics her identity was a secret. After the publication of her next book and first novel made people proclaimed that they wrote the book. In response, Mary Ann Evans gave herself as the true author and this was causing quite a problem in public that still regarded women as incapable of serious writing. Eliot wrote many novels, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), this was before publishing Silas Marner (1861), the tale of a lonely, miserly village weaver transformed by the love of his adopted daughter.  Eliot's novels are philosophical due to her interest in philosophy. She was influenced by many people and this helped her create the work that she did. Most of the people she worked with were foreign and she used some of their work, translate it in English and then put it into her novels. In her novels she had many dilemmas and her characters were different, she involved many techniques of writing and used them effectively. Silas Marner was Eliot's third novel and is among 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 industrialized. The novel's concern with class and family can similarly be linked back to Eliot's own life. Though Silas Marner 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 many other things were rapidly changing.

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   The characters in Silas Marner were George Eliot’s perception to represent the working class and wanted to show what many of them do and what they have to live with. She portrayed them in Silas Marner. She has given each character a different personality representing their different working class. People get what they deserve in this novel due to their own doing. Silas is a main character in George Eliot’s novel. Silas is punished early on but he is happy because he has committed any wrong doing so he gets what he deserves although it can be argued. ...

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