This is my symphony

Today is day 19 of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.  The challenge began with A on April 1 and continues the alphabet throughout the
month, except on Sundays. My theme for the month will be this blog’s tagline: life, books, and all things bookish, so you can expect a little bit of this ‘n that. I’m still reading, though, and I’ll add reviews whenever possible. Thirty days of blogging is a huge commitment for me, but I’m looking forward to meeting and greeting new blog friends.

Today’s words: Silas Marner

I love George Eliot. I love her life story. She was a free thinker, in and out of the Church until she settled on her own understanding of spirituality. She was a woman of independent means–maybe not by choice, but by her wit and intelligence. She loved openly and passionately, even when her choices meant she was rejected from polite society. She was anything but attractive–but possessed great beauty.

I love the seemingly quaint moral tales she writes about life in the English countryside in the 19th century, all of which reveal some sort of illicit love and characters who lived on the margins of society–and about how they created (or tried to, anyway) the life they longed for. Adam Bede with Heddy’s forbidden love, unwanted pregnancy, and near-death; Mill on the Floss with Maggie’s love for the hunchback Phillip and that last dying embrace; Middlemarch with Dorothea’s ill-fated marriage and unrequited love.

And of course, Silas Marner, that near-sighted, hunched “old man” (who was actually, if you count the years, only 40-something!) who was brought into the warm embrace of village life when a baby, quite literally, shows up on his doorstep. A cast of characters who are as dear to me as the people who have passed in and out of my own life. Those nasty, haughty Cass boys, the ones you love to hate–Godfrey, who though he appears all heart in his life with Nancy, lived a lie; Eppie, the golden child I always picture as Shirley Temple. And Dolly Winthrup. Gosh, I love that woman and her malapropisms.

It’s a novel about betrayal and the truest of loves. It’s about burying oneself in work or working as an outpouring of love. It’s shutting down and opening up, turning within or reaching out. It’s about connection to each other.

And it all turns around that bent little man with bleary eyes who shields his heart so it can never be broken again–Silas Marner.