Silas Marner is one of George Eliot's many Realist novels. It centers itself around describing and portraying the elements of life in England in the early 1800s in an accurate way. Eliot is considered a master of this genre, and was one of the most important literary figures of the Victorian period largely because of her extensive influence on it. As a Realist, Eliot focuses deeply on small instances of conversation and on exhaustive and detailed description of the environment and its inhabitants. These give the reader a historically accurate and comprehensive vision of the world of Silas Marner.
Although a good deal of the writing is devoted to moralizing and religious commentary, this actually makes Silas Marner even more evidently part of the Realist genre. Eliot's use of moralizing language echoes the intensely religious lifestyles of many of the rural communities of the time. People would have encountered language like hers often, in church and in schools.
The way the novel realistically represents issues like this, which pertain to the inner lives of characters, also places it in the psychological subgenre of Realism. The book spends a lot of its time "figuring out" and explaining why characters do what they do, digging into the interior lives and motivations of almost everyone it touches.
The novel is also often cited as belonging to the pastoral genre, a kind of fiction which emphasizes idealized descriptions of rural life and the countryside. The poor are often depicted as happy and co-operative in these novels, and the rich as benevolent and generous. Eliot doesn't usually stick to these classist generalizations of character in her writing, as she often employs elements of these pastoral tropes to point out the unfairness of the division of wealth in England. However, the surrounding landscapes and style of living represented in this book are certainly pastoral and idealized, as they depict "nutty hedgerows" and "bright green hillocks." The villages of Lantern Yard and Raveloe are—at least initially—filled with bucolic, romantic descriptions of the English countryside and its inhabitants. Eliot also shows some of the Romantic influences on her writing in these passages, as the sublime natural beauty of the setting influences her characters' actions and worldviews.
This book is also in some ways a Christian allegory. Silas Marner's movement from greed and selfishness to charity and emotional equilibrium is strongly linked to the novel's morals and Christian values. Eliot's novel, like many in her day, follows this trajectory and explains its significance to the reader in depth. This is complicated, however, by Eliot's own wavering relationship with institutional religion. Rather than instructing the reader that the Anglican church is always correct, the narrative asks them repeatedly to think about what values are important and how these align with conventional Christian practices. In typical allegorical fashion, the more Silas understands the link between the Christian God and a loving community that co-operates, the happier and more satisfied he is with his life.
