Lorna's Reviews > The Mill on the Floss

In the Introduction to my copy by A.S. Byatt, she states that The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860, marks the end of what could be called the first stage of George Eliot’s work as an artist. Preceding this book was Scenes of a Clerical Life and Adam Bede, giving a realistic history of unfashionable families covered by memories of the author herself or of her family drawing on the people and places from the Warwickshire where her father had been supervisor and agent of the estates of Arbury Hall. It is noted by Ms. Byatt that although The Mill on the Floss is set in Lincolnshire, where she had traveled to find suitable rivers for her catastrophic flood, Dorlcote Mill closely resembles Arbury Mill, where Mary Ann Evans played as a child. A.S. Byatt continues the similarities between the life of George Eliot and the heroine of the book, Margaret Tulliver. In addition to the Introduction, there are wonderful explanatory notes and a chronology by A.S. Byatt relating The Mill on the Floss to George Eliot’s own life.

Spanning a period of ten to fifteen years and beginning in the late 1820s, The Mill on the Floss details the lives of brother and sister Tom and Maggie Tulliver growing up at the Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss. Maggie Tulliver is the protagonist with the story beginning when she is nine years old. Tom and Maggie have a close yet complex bond that continues throughout the novel. However, Maggie’s passionate and wayward nature as well as her fierce intelligence brings her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between three very different men. There is the ongoing struggle with her proud and stubborn brother, a close friend who is the son of the family’s enemy causing them financial hardship and ruin, and a charismatic but dangerous suitor reportedly the fiancée of her cousin. It is within this backdrop that we have one of the most powerful and moving novels by George Eliot.

“You may see her now, as she walks down the favourite turning and enters the Deeps by a narrow path through a group of Scotch firs—her tall figure and old lavender gown visible through an hereditary black silk shawl of some wide-meshed net-like material; and now she is sure of being unseen, she takes off her bonnet and ties it over her arm. One would certainly suppose her to be farther on in life than her seventeenth year—perhaps because of the slow resigned sadness of the glance, from which all search and unrest seem to have departed, perhaps because her broad-chested figure has the mould of early womanhood.”

“With her dark colouring and jet crown surmounting her tall figure, she seems to have a sort of kinship with the grand Scotch firs, at which she is looking up as if she loved them well. Yet one has a sense of uneasiness in looking at her—a sense of opposing elements, of which a fierce collision is imminent; surely there is a hushed expression such as one often sees in older faces under borderless caps, out of keeping with the resistant youth, which one expects to flash out in a sudden, passionate glance that will dissipate the quietude, like a damped fire leaping out again when all seemed safe.”