Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, and Adam Bede form a group that make use of childhood recollections and the rural world Eliot knew in Warwickshire. She said that Silas Marner came to her "first of all, quite suddenly, as a sort of legendary tale suggested by my recollection of having once, in early childhood, seen a linen-weaver with a bag on his back." The novel uses other aspects of her childhood as well, including her knowledge of both Anglican worship and the more enthusiastic forms of Christianity.
However, the story was shaped in the mind of a mature and highly intelligent woman, and it represents the beliefs of her maturity. Two ideas that are expressed in Eliot's letters of about this time are that "the idea of God . . . is the ideal of a goodness entirely human," and that "no man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience." Eliot believed strongly in the interdependence of humanity, and in all her novels she is greatly concerned to discover what might be considered good and what bad in social relationships. Silas Marner is no exception. Eliot said of the book: "it sets — or is intended to set — in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural human relations."
