The Lake English Classics Silas Marner

by George Eliot

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1902

About the author

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

Reviews

[Grace Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s no Middlemarch but she is just so good at dialogue and her characters feel so real and she can create so many different people authentically

I probably need to read other classics or other writers of this caliber to adjust my gauge but at this point, her writing is just on an entirely higher plane

Perhaps it’s the difference in modern writing style? I don’t know enough to be able to articulate the difference nor how to identify a modern day classic
But now I’m curious…classic bc of the quality of writing or does the criteria change based on the values of the times? Or tastes change
Where does it fall on the objective to subjective spectrum? Who gets to make those decisions?