ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that transcendence is not an affair only for male writers writing primarily of male characters or female writers writing primarily of female characters. George Eliot writes, in Silas Marner, the struggles of an old and isolated man to reconnect with himself and the world through his unselfish love for a little girl named Hephzibah, or Eppie. In his relationship with Eppie, Silas practices what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls a retournement dans l’Autre, a turning toward the Other. Through his love and devotion for another, Silas finds the essence of his own truest self. Silas is because he loves.
