Teresa's Reviews > The Mill on the Floss

4.5

Funny how the title of a book can put you off reading it, making it sound boring, especially to your younger self, and how that preconception can stick with you through the years. I felt that way about Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop until I finally read some Cather and I felt that way about this title. A mill as a main ‘character’? And what in the world is a floss?

The mill is a driving force, yet Maggie is the main character and it’s easy to see the young girl as the portrait of a young Eliot. Her love of and pride in her reading is tolerated condescendingly in the community; an intelligent woman is not a good thing, as even her proud father makes plain to her. From early on, one senses the doom that hangs over Maggie, a female dissatisfied with the limits of provincial life, yearning for more, while fiercely loving her home and her family.

A passage about books and reading and a millworker not wanting to know anything of "fellow-creatures" in the wider world had me thinking about Eliot’s continuing relevance, though she is not mocking this man. Eliot is empathetic toward all her characters, telling (and it is telling, not showing, in that 19th-century-literature way) the reader more than once not to think too poorly of this or that character, even one I inwardly sighed over every time she appeared.

Though the ending is beautifully written, and I realize it's of its time period, I was disappointed with it, especially with whom Maggie’s fate is ultimately tied to, as I found the description out of that person’s character, though true to Maggie and to the novel’s theme.

I can’t speak to Death Comes for the Archbishop—I still haven’t read it—but if I’d read 'The Mill on the Floss' as a young adult, I have a feeling it would’ve been as precious to me as Maggie’s few books were to her.