What is The Mill on the Floss about?

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.

The ending is genuinely controversial. Eliot resolves an unresolvable situation by drowning both siblings in the Floss. Critics have argued for 160 years about whether this is a failure of nerve, a formal solution to a problem the novel has backed itself into, or a deliberate statement that Maggie's particular kind of intelligence has no survivable outcome in her world. The third reading is the most interesting, and also the most uncomfortable.

Eliot draws on her own childhood and her complex relationship with her brother Isaac, who cut off contact with her over her unconventional life. The novel is deeply personal in ways that neither sanitize nor exploit that material. Maggie is not George Eliot, but the pressure behind the characterization is unmistakable. For readers who came from Middlemarch, this novel is rawer and less controlled — more felt than thought. For first-time Eliot readers, it may be the better starting point.