George Eliot’s Shorter Fiction, including Silas Marner

Abstract

Of George Eliot’s six shorter prose-tales only Silas Marner is developed into a full novella with a double plot. The others conform to Henry James’s notion of the short story as anecdote, where a single situation is carefully elaborated.¹ They all contain interesting narrative effects, like the two dialogue scenes run into the one chapter (Ch. 3) in ‘Amos Barton’, the rendering of Dempster’s consciousness in a state of delirium tremens in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (Ch. 23) or the large time gaps in Silas Marner. In none of these tales do the chapters have titles or mottoes in aid of contemplation. If narrative haste is scarcely a quality to be associated with George Eliot, since she gives over so much space to narratorial comment, yet she can also use unexpected deaths and brief, suspenseful chapter-endings like Dunsey Cass’s exit, ‘So he stepped forward into the darkness’ (Silas Marner, Gh. 4), to cut the content, though not the substance, of her stories. But what distinguishes each one of her shorter works is the impression given of a strong theme delicately handled. Behind the presentational cover of sympathy for commonplace people experiencing unromantic incidents in average communities set in ordinary landscapes, where there is ‘nothing to break the flowerless monotony of grass and hedgerow but an occasional oak or elm, and a few cows sprinkled here and there’ (Janet’s Repentance’, Ch. 26), there is a nudging towards implicit radical analyses of complex and sensitive issues.