Word: marner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such resounding but paradoxical praise for novelist George Eliot was characteristic in her time. Today, young students and many adults who are obliged to read her worst book, Silas Marner, look on the great woman author as a kind of nanny-goat novelist. But the Victorian public, teetering between reason and sentiment, and tormented by the discrepancy between public virtue and private vice, was shocked and then charmed both by the author's daring life and her works. It began by accepting her early writing as the creation of a country parson, and it ended by making...
Holbrook's impact on Britain's educational establishment has been heavy. His five anthologies of prose and poetry are used in thousands of state and private schools. Instead of the usual diet of Wordsworth and Silas Marner, the students get kitchen-sink selections from Hemingway on the birth of a baby, D. H. Lawrence on a son's quarrel with his mother, Koestler on a Communist execution, Joyce on a Dublin funeral. Holbrook's first book on education-combining theory, sample student compositions, and Holbrook's interpretations of their efforts-is required reading at most...
...growing over them in the pale moonlight." Dead he was, and despite a recent and wholly campus-bound revival, he is likely to remain so: his best-known novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, will no doubt remain merely the second deadly Silas (after George Eliot's Silas Marner) of required student reading...