2012 Book #5: Silas Marner

So, after an attempt at some pop fiction, I’ve retreated the comfort of the classics. And comfortable it is.

Silas Marner is about a lonely weaver who moves to a small town after he was falsely accused of a crime in his hometown. His new neighbors are superstitious and wonder why he’d move there – and they treat him accordingly. He finds solace in the gold he saves from his weaving, hiding it under his floor and counting it every night. Until someone steals it. After that, he’s miserable; everyone thinks he’s crazy. Then, one night, a child appears at his hearth. He soon discovers that the child’s mother lies dead outside. Silas decides to keep the child and raise her as his own. Turns out that the child’s real father (spoiler!) is a rich man in the town, but said rich man doesn’t want anyone to know that he’d been married and had a child with a poor woman before he’d married someone closer to his social stature. And I guess I shouldn’t go too much farther with the plot, or you’ll be pissed at me if you read the book.

Because it’s good, and it’s worth reading. I really enjoyed Silas Marner, though it was a bit slow going. There were some spots that seemed to go on forever. I know why Eliot put those scenes in, but I wish she’d kept them a little shorter. This novel is also my first experience with George Eliot. When I was in college, I shunned anything related to the Victorian (which also explains why I did so badly on the Lit GRE back in the day). I didn’t even read A Tale of Two Cities or Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre until after I’d finished my English degree. Which is absolutely crazy. I’d always assumed I’d hate them. Okay, I didn’t especially like Wuthering Heights, but alas.

Anyway, Silas Marner is good, and you should give it a read if you haven’t already. It’s a pretty stereotypical Victorian novel – and a short one. I’m going to give George Eliot another try soon, though I’m a little concerned that if her longer novels are as slow in parts, I might not end up finishing them.

(Also, check out In the process of reading: Silas Marner.)

In the process of reading: Silas Marner

After a couple of bad experiences with pop fiction, I’ve wound my way back to where I’m comfortable: good ol’ fashioned schoolin’ books. Like Silas Marner, which I was never assigned in college (nor was I assigned any George Eliot, at all, but that’s another story for another day). The novel, though really good so far, is a slow read. I think it’s Eliot’s style, about which I’m not complaining. It’s just taking me longer than I thought it would.
So, in the meantime, I thought I’d read a bit about George Eliot because, well, I avoided Victorian-related classes in college because I was sure I would hate them. Which, I guess, is not the case.
Anyway, after reading the Wikipedia article (I know), I found a lovely essay Eliot wrote called “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” in which she complains about the female writers of her day. It’s actually pretty funny. She says that there’s a common misconception that poor ladies write novels to pay the bills, and that should make up for at least a bit of their general crappiness. That’s not the case, though: it’s usually rich, idle women doing the writing, and they’re “inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains." They suck at writing and at life: “[T]heir intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness.” There are, of course, women who actually can write (“Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men.”), and of course Eliot counts herself in that number, though it appears that she fit into the idle class, too. No mention of that, of course. But I digress. She says that one of the most significant reasons for so much shitty output from female writers is that, unlike playing a piano, you can write badly and not know it because writing is so freeform:

No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements.  Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements—genuine observation, humor, and passion.  But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women.  Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down.  Every art which had its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility.  But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery.

I need to read more about authors. I’ve never had an interest in history (again, I know), so I’ve shied away even from Wikipedia articles. When I was in college, getting me to read the biography blurb in a Norton Anthology before reading the actual piece was like pulling teeth. And the essays in the back? Yeah, right. Thus, I’ve read a lot, but I don’t know anything about who wrote anything. I have a feeling I’m missing out.