Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe

Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1861. Full Description:

ELIOT, George. Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1861.

First edition. Octavo (7 7/8 x 5 inches; 200 x 125 mm). [4, unnumbered ads for "The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle"], [6], 364, [16 publisher's ads] pp. With half-title. The 4 paged advertisement of Dr Alexander Carlyle's autobiography is bound between the front endpapers. This copy is almost completely unopened.

Publisher's cinnamon cloth, bound by Edmonds & Remnants, with binder's ticket to rear pastedown. Boards paneled and bordered in blind. Spine stamped and lettered in gilt. Light yellow endpapers. The very slightest of spine extremity wear. Some minor bumps to top and bottom of board edges. A near invisible split at top of outer joint. Still an about fine copy, housed in a quarter morocco clamshell.

"Silas Marner, always a favourite with readers, was until recently considered too obvious and too lightweight to merit serious discussion. In 1949, F.R. Leavis echoed the views of many when he described it as "that charming minor masterpiece", an evident "moral fable". Only in one respect was the work seen as unusual: it appeared to have no direct bearing on its author's life. Ever since the mid-1950s, however, it has gradually gathered advocates who have shown that it is not only as rich in ideas, but also as firmly rooted in George Eliot's personal concerns as any of her other works and somewhat suprisingly, these two issues have been increasingly seen as one... It was not until 1985, however, when Sandra Gilbert argued that Eppie is the central character and that the novel's principal theme is the riddle of daughterhood, that anyone specifically explored the implications for a woman of the relationship between Eppie and Silas. Through Silas, she affirms, George Eliot was able to examine "the dispossesion that she herself had experienced as part of the empty pack of daughterhood" (Dawson, Light Enough to Trusten By: Structure and Experience in Silas Marner, 1993).

Carter p. 112. Parrish, p. 15. Sadleir 819. Wolff 2063.

HBS 68993.

$3,250.