Silas Marner:

Falsely accused, cut off from his past, Silas the weaver is reduced to a spider-like existence, endlessly weaving his web and hoarding his gold. Meanwhile, Godfrey Cass, son of the squire, contracts a secret marriage. While the village celebrates Christmas and New Year, two apparently inexplicable events occur: Silas loses his gold and finds a child on his hearth. This is the shortest and most immediately accessible of Eliot's novels. She takes the materials of legend and fairy-tale and provides them with a historically precise setting, drawing on some of the most advanced ideas of her day in order to represent states of mind and belief at the limits of rational perception.