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Explanation and Analysis:
George Eliot's writing is always intensely focused on representing the development of character and the growth of the personality. This means that Silas Marner's language involves lots of personal reflection and the thorough description of emotions. Eliot's long and sometimes meandering sentences echo the thought patterns of her characters. The is particularly true when the book employs free indirect discourse—a technique in which the narrator briefly takes on the perspective of a character. Instead of getting immediately to a point, Eliot's writing works exhaustively through ideas, reflecting the indirect nature of human cognition and decision-making.
In these moments and almost everywhere else, the diction of Silas Marner is dense. It's packed with detail and addresses situations from many angles at once. The author underscores her Realist approach with exhaustive descriptions of place, time, and surroundings, bombarding the reader with information. Although the novel isn't fast-paced to begin with, it feels longer than it is because of how much stuff Eliot's intense style compels the reader to receive and understand.
Moreover, Eliot's sentences in Silas Marner are notably long even when it's just the narrator talking. They are not meandering—each gets to its point about as quickly as possible—but those points are complicated and often incorporate rhetorical questions, moral ponderings, and social comparisons. It can be hard to quote Silas Marner concisely, as so many of Eliot's phrases in this book span many lines.
It's worth noting too that this is Eliot's most overtly Christian novel, in which the values of Christianity and the salvation offered by "divine love" are shown to be the only real way to achieve fulfillment. Eliot's narrative voice often has overtones of the sermon, as it describes a broader concept like "community" or "fatherhood," and relates it to a smaller instance in everyday life. The diction of the novel is full of Christian language, invoking "divine Providence" and "faithful affection" regularly and evocatively.
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