Romola is a historical novel by George Eliot set in the fifteenth century, and is "a deep study of life in the city of Florence from an intellectual, artistic, religious, and social point of view". The story takes place amidst actual historical events during the Italian Renaissance, and includes in its plot several notable figures from Florentine history.

Romola

George Eliot's tale of a solitary miser gradually redeemed by the joy of fatherhood, Silas Marner is edited with an introduction and notes by David Carroll in Penguin Classics.Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the chance to transform his life. His fate, and that of Eppie, the little girl he adopts, is entwined with Godfrey Cass, son of the village Squire, who, like Silas, is trapped by his past. Silas Marner, George Eliot's favourite of her novels, combines humour, rich symbolism and pointed social criticism to create an unsentimental but affectionate portrait of rural life.This text uses the Cabinet edition, revised by George Eliot in 1878. David Carroll's introduction is complemented by the original Penguin Classics edition introduction by Q.D. Leavis.Mary Ann Evans (1819-80) began her literary career as a translator, and later editor, of the Westminster Review. In 1857, she published Scenes of Clerical Life, the first of eight novels she would publish under the name of 'George Eliot', including The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda.If you enjoyed Silas Marner, you might like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, also available in Penguin Classics.'I think Silas Marner holds a higher place than any of the author's works. It is more nearly a masterpiece; it has more of that simple, rounded, consummate aspect ... which marks a classical work'Henry James

Silas Marner

Middlemarch (1871-1872) est le plus grand roman victorien, et aux yeux de certains le meilleur roman de langue anglaise, toutes époques confondues. Quête de la vérité menée de plusieurs points de vue, le livre ne saurait être réduit au destin de Dorothea Brooke, jeune fille altruiste et utopiste qui épouse un érudit desséché. Autour du couple gravitent de nombreux personnages, assujettis à des liens familiaux, conjugaux, de voisinage, d'intérêts. George Eliot entrelace les destins individuels, ménage des rebondissements dignes d'un feuilleton, sans jamais céder à la facilité : sa peinture psychologique est de la plus grande finesse lorsqu'elle décrit les désirs et les tragédies de ceux dont les vies s'entremêlent sur la trame d'une même étoffe. Son acuité peut se parer d'ironie, sans que jamais s'étiole la sympathie qu'elle éprouve pour ses créatures confrontées à la défaite de leurs aspirations. Les événements se déroulent dans l'Angleterre provinciale des années 1830, mais ce «plaidoyer pour la beauté des vies ordinaires» (Mona Ozouf) a pour sujet les passions humaines, qui sont sans âge. 
Middlemarch est ici précédé du chef-d'oeuvre de la première période de George Eliot, Le Moulin sur la Floss (1860). Eliot, née Mary Anne Evans, a mis beaucoup d'elle-même dans le personnage de Maggie Tulliver, petite fille turbulente à la nature exaltée, passionnée par les livres, «aussi affamée de savoir qu'elle l'est d'amour» (M. Ozouf). Proust avouait avoir pleuré à la lecture de ce roman du paradis perdu de l'enfance. Maggie sera victime de l'ostracisme social - comme sa créatrice, qui vécut vingt-cinq ans avec un homme qui n'était pas son mari et chercha, à travers une oeuvre littéraire liant l'intellect aux sentiments, à obtenir cette respectabilité chère aux victoriens. 
À sa mort, en 1880, elle fut célébrée comme «le plus grand romancier anglais contemporain». On ne lui permit pourtant pas d'être enterrée, comme l'avait été Dickens, dans le «Coin des poètes» de l'abbaye de Westminster.

Middlemarch / le moulin sur la Floss

Middlemarch

Silas Marner 

The Mill on the Floss

"Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. "

George Eliot Collection

The mill on the floss (oxford world's classics)

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe is the third novel by George Eliot, published in 1861.

An outwardly simple tale of a linen weaver, it is notable for its strong realism and its sophisticated treatment of a variety of issues ranging from religion to industrialisation to community.

(from wikipedia.org)

Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.

Daniel Deronda

Ce sommet de l'histoire du roman anglais (qui en compte d'ailleurs beaucoup) date de 1860. Le thème principal en est l'amour tragique entre un frère et une soeur, qui se brouillent de longues années pour se réconcilier dans la mort. Entre-temps, la jeune fille a été amoureuse d'un infirme, puis du fiancé de sa cousine : mal lui en prendra. Le meilleur du livre est dans la peinture poétique de l'existence quotidienne la plus humble, dans «le sentiment de la question mystérieuse de la vie humaine et de la vie de la nature, des mystères sublimes auxquels nous participons en le sachant aussi peu que la fleur qui pousse» (Marcel Proust). On aimera ainsi «la nouveauté des images venant d'une vue tendre et neuve des choses».

Romola

Résumé

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