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What it argues
The Mill on the Floss opens with one of the most fully realized childhoods in Victorian fiction. Maggie Tulliver, the miller's daughter, is passionate, bookish, impulsive, and more intelligent than anyone around her knows how to use. Her brother Tom is steady, conventional, and devoted to the family in a way that will eventually cost both of them enormously. The first third of the novel is so precise about the texture of their childhood — the particular cruelty and tenderness between siblings, the social life of a provincial mill town, the humiliations and small triumphs of being an unusual child in an ordinary place — that some readers consider it the best bildungsroman in the language.
Then the family loses the mill, Tom's entire self-conception becomes about recovering it, and Maggie grows up. The second half of the novel is harder and more conflicted. Maggie's intelligence has no sanctioned outlet — there are no professions available to her, no education she can seek, no way to become the person her mind could make her. She attaches to people who don't deserve her attachment. She makes a catastrophic choice about a man named Stephen Guest that destroys her social reputation and permanently ruptures her relationship with Tom. She comes back. Tom won't forgive her. The river floods.
What it gets right
- 1.
Maggie Tulliver is one of fiction's great portraits of intelligence stranded in a context that cannot use it — the specific frustration of a woman who can think but has no acceptable way to act on what she thinks.
- 2.
The childhood sections are psychologically exact about sibling dynamics, the formation of temperament, and the long-lasting weight of early experiences.
- 3.
Tom's rigid moral code is presented with full sympathy and then shown to be exactly what destroys his relationship with the person he loves most.
What it covers
Who wrote it
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), one of the foremost English novelists of the Victorian era. The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860, draws closely on her Midlands childhood and her relationship with her brother Isaac, who refused contact with her after she began living with the philosopher George Henry Lewes. Her other major works include Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch. She is widely considered the greatest English novelist of her century.
