Silas Marner

By the time I was ready for my own high school summer reading list, I was grateful for “girl books”: “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre” and “Rebecca,” “Silas Marner,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”

I despised George Eliot in junior high, because reading “Silas Marner” wasn’t my idea.

I can’t help but wonder why no one ever asks if reading Shakespeare is useful or notes that they’ve never needed to dredge up a quote from “The Wasteland” or use a reference from “Silas Marner.”

Bulkington, an otherwise undistinguished village close to her childhood home, became Raveloe, the village where Silas Marner weaves his linen and shuns his neighbours.

The machinations of European powers and the funny mustached German dictator were as remote to our island in the fall of 1941 as Silas Marner, which sapped our energies through eighth-grade English.