When the weaver Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he becomes a miser and vows to turn his back upon the world. But an extraordinary sequence of events, including the appearance of a tiny child in his cottage, melts Silas's heart and transforms his life. George Eliot's tender pastoral is at once a realistic story of rural life and a symbolic drama of sin and repentance. Written in her simplest style, it paints a vivid picture of a rural life long since vanished.