SILAS MARNER, George Eliot's timeless tale of simple people in small-town England, has the unwarranted reputation of being moralistic and saccharine; it is, in fact, one of George Eliot's most comic, balanced, and moving works of fiction. Falsely accused of theft, Silas Marner flees his home town and takes up residence in Raveloe, where he works as a weaver but remains an outsider. Embittered, alienated from humanity, and old before his time, he becomes a miser, able to love only his hoard of money, until he takes in a child who comes to him for shelter and redeems him through the power of love. Eliot's third novel, published in 1861, SILAS MARNER contains many echoes of its author's life, including her loss of religious faith and her concern for the traditional trades and ways of life that were beginning, even then, to disappear from the English countryside.