LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — The Moore County Public Library’s Brown Bag Book Club is trading in a modern bestseller for a 19th-century classic. The local book club will pick up George Eliot’s Silas Marner as its September read. The club meets on the final Friday of each month, so the group will discuss Silas Marner on September 25 at 1 p.m. at the Moore County Public Library.

It’s a notable pivot. Where there previous read, Hang the Moon, was a recent commercial release, Silas Marner has been in print since 1861 — a novel that has outlasted its author by more than a century and remains a staple of English literature courses. For a club used to newer fiction, taking on a classic is its own kind of commitment, and one worth recognizing.

The novel follows a weaver who is falsely accused of theft and cast out of his tight-knit religious community. Embittered and alone, he settles in the rural village of Raveloe, withdraws from his neighbors, and spends his years hoarding gold — until the money is stolen and, not long after, an orphaned toddler wanders into his cottage out of a snowstorm. Silas takes the child in and raises her as his own, and in doing so is slowly drawn back into the life of the community he had shut out. It’s a novel about isolation and belonging, about what actually holds a person’s life together, and it ends up asking whether gold or a relationship is the truer form of security.

Readers who don’t already know may be surprised to learn “George Eliot” wasn’t a man at all. The name was a pen name for Mary Ann Evans, an English writer who published under a male pseudonym for a mix of reasons: to ensure her work would be judged on its own merits rather than dismissed the way many novels by women were at the time, and to keep her private life — she was in a decades-long relationship with a married man, philosopher George Henry Lewes, considered scandalous by Victorian standards — separate from the reception of her writing. It worked. Her novels, Silas Marner among them, went on to be regarded as some of the finest in the English.

There’s something fitting about a small community picking up a novel that is, at its core, about what a small community can offer a person that isolation can’t. Silas Marner only becomes whole again through the people around him — not despite his circumstances, but because his neighbors, in their imperfect and ordinary way, stay present for him.

That’s not a bad thing to sit with in Lynchburg these days. In an era when so much of daily life happens through a screen, sustained attention to a single novel — let alone a 19th-century one — is itself a small act of resistance. And a library book club is exactly the kind of “third place” sociologists talk about losing: a spot that isn’t home and isn’t work, where people show up in person, on a schedule, to talk to their neighbors about something other than the news.

The library isn’t just hosting a book discussion. It’s holding open one of the few remaining rooms in town where people gather face to face, on purpose, for something other than a transaction. In a town this size, that matters more than it might in a bigger city — and reading a book about a community learning to hold onto one of its own feels like the right choice for a community trying to do the same.

The Brown Bag Book Club meets on the final Friday of each month at the Moore County Public Library, with Silas Marner set for discussion September 25. Attendees are welcome to bring their lunch. The library is located at 17 Majors Boulevard in Lynchburg. To learn more about their events and programs, visit their Facebook page. •

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