Silas Marner (1861) is one of George Eliot's briefest novels,and by the comparatively long-winded Victorian standards of its day, barely a novel at all. But for all its brevity, Silas Marner is not light reading. Rather it is a fable that treats complex social questions, and like many other fables, it manages, in its simplicity, to capture some of the world's difficult truths with as much resonance and psychological acuity as much longer, denser works. It's easy to read Silas Marner in a week, but continued exploration of the novel will yield new questions and insights for months, even years.