Introduction and Notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York Although the shortest of George Eliot’s novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner – a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England – and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie. Silas Marner is a tender and moving tale of sin and repentance set in a vanished rural world and holds the reader’s attention until the last page as Eppie’s bonds of affection for Silas are put to the test.