In brief
A miller’s dark, clever, unmanageable daughter adores a brother who is honest, limited and certain he is right. Their father loses a lawsuit and the mill, and the family’s respectable world closes over her. She tries to kill her desires with Thomas à Kempis, loves a deformed young man Tom forbids, is carried down a river by her cousin’s suitor, comes back unmarried to a town that decides she is ruined, and drowns with her brother in a flood. George Eliot’s second novel is the most autobiographical of her books and the least under control, and those two facts are connected.
Half of it is an extraordinary comedy of rural childhood and provincial money. The other half is a girl with nowhere to go.
The argument
The question is what you owe to where you come from when it cannot understand you. In a famous pause at the start of Book 4, Eliot sets the ruined villages of the Rhone beside these “emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers”, and admits that the ruins have more poetry. “I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness,” she says, “but it is necessary that we should feel it”, to see how such lives act on young people who have risen above their parents’ level yet remain “tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts” (Book 4, ch. 1). That is the whole novel in one sentence, and the sentence is not a complaint. The fibres are real, and they are the best thing in Maggie.
So when Stephen Guest argues that their love is its own law, her answer is not prudence but memory: “If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?” (Book 6, ch. 14). Eliot gives Maggie that line with full conviction, and then has Tom shut the door on her for acting on it. Elsewhere the narrator insists on the opposite of any rule: “moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot”, and all people of sense dislike “the men of maxims” (Book 7, ch. 2). The book believes both things, that you must keep faith with the past and that no law can tell you how, and it does not reconcile them. It drowns them.
The shape of the book
Seven Books run from Boy and Girl through School-Time, The Downfall, The Valley of Humiliation, Wheat and Tares and The Great Temptation to The Final Rescue. The proportions are the first thing to notice. Book 1, covering a short stretch of childhood, takes up about a quarter of the novel, and Book 7 is under a tenth. Eliot saw this herself. Writing to John Blackwood in July 1860, she regretted that the “epische Breite” of the first two volumes, into which love of the subject had led her, had left the third too short, so that the tragedy was not properly prepared.
The water, though, is planned from the first word. The opening sentence has the Floss meeting the tide in “an impetuous embrace” (Book 1, ch. 1), and the climax has brother and sister “gone down in an embrace never to be parted” (Book 7, ch. 5). In between, Maggie explains a picture of a witch in Defoe’s History of the Devil: “if she’s drowned—and killed, you know—she’s innocent” (Book 1, ch. 3). Tom plans a Noah’s ark (Book 1, ch. 6). St Ogg’s has its legend of a ferryman and a flood-time Virgin (Book 1, ch. 12), and Maggie drifts past the point of return in a chapter called Borne Along by the Tide (Book 6, ch. 13). Eliot’s journal for January 1859 records going into town to look through the Annual Register “for cases of inundation”. The flood, then, was not a late escape from a plot she could not finish, whatever else is wrong with it.
The voice
The opening chapter is a small trick that has had a long life. The narrator describes the mill and the little girl watching the wheel, and then wakes: “I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair, and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill” (Book 1, ch. 1). A remembered childhood opening out of a half-sleep is one reason Proust scholars keep coming back to this novel.
The comedy depends on an ear for speech that Eliot never surpassed. Mr Tulliver, proud of his daughter, reckons “an over-’cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep,—she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that” (Book 1, ch. 2), and his view of the world is that it is “puzzling”. Mr Stelling gives Maggie the verdict of educated England on girls: “They’re quick and shallow” (Book 2, ch. 1). And the narrator refuses to grown-up condescension what it most wants: “These bitter sorrows of childhood! when sorrow is all new and strange” (Book 1, ch. 5). The dead rabbits, the hair cut off in a fit of rage (Book 1, ch. 7), the wooden Fetish in the attic she drives nails into (Book 1, ch. 4): all are written as if they matter, because to her they do.
Dodsons and Tullivers
The novel is also a precise social study of a commercial town about to change. The Dodson sisters, Maggie’s aunts, have a religion made of linen, solvency and the correct way to bottle cowslip wine. Eliot mocks them and does not despise them: their code keeps people from starving, and when the crisis comes it is Aunt Glegg, the most terrible of them, who stands up for Maggie against the town (Book 7, ch. 3). The Tullivers are the other strain, warm, proud and ruinous.
The plot’s first half is about law and water. Mr Tulliver goes to court against a neighbour upstream over the Ripple, with Wakem the lawyer against him, and loses everything (Book 3, ch. 1). He stays on as a hired manager in his own mill, and makes Tom write a curse in the family Bible: “I wish evil may befall him” (Book 3, ch. 9). Tom keeps the vow by the only means available, by going into trade with Mr Deane and paying the creditors in full (Book 5, ch. 6). On the same triumphant day Mr Tulliver thrashes Wakem, and it kills him: “This world’s been too many for me, my lad” (Book 5, ch. 7). Tom inherits the hatred along with the mill, and Maggie pays for it.
Renunciation
Book 4’s turning point is an old book with marked passages, in a bundle Bob Jakin brings her. Reading Thomas à Kempis, Maggie has an insight that comes “like the suddenly apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure” (Book 4, ch. 3). The narrator is not deceived: Maggie “threw some exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her self-renunciation”. And Philip Wakem, who loves her, tells her in the Red Deeps what it is: “You are not resigned; you are only trying to stupefy yourself”, and he calls it “this long suicide” (Book 5, ch. 3).
He is right, and yet the book never quite lets him win. On the river with Stephen, Maggie’s refusal, “It is not the force that ought to rule us” (Book 6, ch. 14), is her finest moment and also the same act in a new form. Is she choosing the faith of the past, or is she unable to want anything she has not been refused? Eliot was a woman who had chosen against her family and paid for it, and she gives her heroine the opposite choice and has her pay for that as well. St Ogg’s, in a passage of real fury, condemns her either way: “Public opinion, in these cases, is always of the feminine gender,—not the world, but the world’s wife” (Book 7, ch. 2).
The people
Maggie Tulliver
Maggie’s quickness and hunger are the book’s engine. Her reaction to Madame de Staël’s Corinne says most of it: “I’m determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness” (Book 5, ch. 4). She is funny and greedy for love, and she does cruel things in a temper and repents them at once.
Leslie Stephen called her “the most fascinating child in fiction”, and he thought the grown woman a falling-off. That is the standing dispute about her.
Tom Tulliver
Tom is the book’s best surprise. He has no imagination, an iron sense of justice, and real courage. Maggie’s pleading gets nothing from him: “You will find no home with me” (Book 7, ch. 1). He gives up his youth to pay his father’s debts, and the novel respects that even as it shows what his rectitude does to her.
Mr Tulliver
Maggie’s father loves her best and understands her least. A man who thinks the law was made by the Devil and goes to law anyway, he is the novel’s tragedy in a lower key, and his last words are a modest summary of it.
Philip Wakem
Philip is the son of the family’s enemy, deformed from childhood, cultivated and bitter, the only person who sees what Maggie could be. Her love for him is partly pity, and both of them know it. After the scandal it is his letter of forgiveness that holds her up (Book 7, ch. 3), and it is one of the book’s real generosities.
Stephen Guest and Lucy Deane
Stephen is the book’s notorious problem. He is a rich, pleasant, musical young man, and when he covers Maggie’s bare arm with kisses at a dance (Book 6, ch. 10) he is meant to be overwhelming. Lucy, the fair cousin Maggie once pushed in the mud (Book 1, ch. 10), is better than either of them, and she comes to forgive her at night in the last days (Book 7, ch. 4).
The ending
Maggie gets a boat in the flood and rows to the mill. Tom takes it in without being told: “it was such a new revelation to his spirit, of the depths in life that had lain beyond his vision” that he cannot ask a question, and then finds the one word he has: “the old childish ‘Magsie!’” (Book 7, ch. 5). Then the wreckage comes down on them. It is overwhelming on first reading and hard to defend afterwards. The flood settles what the novel cannot, and gives Maggie the love of the brother on terms that would never have held in daily life.
Eliot did not leave it there. The Conclusion is brief and cold, and it takes back much of what the climax gave: “Nature repairs her ravages, but not all.” Two men come at different times to the tomb, and the inscription, “In their death they were not divided”, is a reading the book has given us every reason to doubt.
How it was made
The novel followed Adam Bede (1859), and Eliot worked on it through 1859, after looking up those floods. It went under the working title “Sister Maggie”; “The Mill on the Floss” was Blackwood’s suggestion, which she took in January 1860, noting that the mill is really on a tributary. She finished on 21 March 1860, and it was published in three volumes on 4 April. St Ogg’s is generally taken from Gainsborough on the Trent, which carries a plaque saying so.
The private material is plain. Mary Ann Evans was close to her older brother Isaac as a child, and when she went to live with the married George Henry Lewes in 1854, he broke off relations and did not write to her again until she married John Cross in 1880. By the time she wrote the book, she had already been judged by her own St Ogg’s. Nine years later, she wrote a sequence of eleven sonnets called “Brother and Sister”, about a childhood very like Tom and Maggie’s.
Readers and critics
The disagreement began at once. Bulwer-Lytton complained of the Stephen affair; Eliot answered through Blackwood that she could not change it because it was too central to what she meant. Henry James, reviewing her novels in 1866, called the ending the book’s chief defect and said a denouement in which Maggie called Stephen back would have been far more interesting. Leslie Stephen called the affair “simply indefensible” and Stephen “a very second-rate young tradesman”, and thought Eliot shared Maggie’s illusion. F. R. Leavis said Maggie’s exaltations and renunciations showed “all the marks of immaturity”, and that Eliot, too close to her, did not see them. Proust wrote in 1910 to Robert de Billy that two pages of the novel reduced him to tears.
Feminist criticism made the book central again. Mary Jacobus’s “The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss” (1981) reads Maggie’s schooling as a question of who is allowed to own language. In the same year, Nancy K. Miller, in “Emphasis Added”, took the Corinne joke as a demand for a different plot.
Afterlives
Tim Whelan’s British film of the later 1930s starred Geraldine Fitzgerald, with James Mason. The BBC serialised it in 1978 with Pippa Guard and Christopher Blake, and a 1997 television film had Emily Watson as Maggie and Bernard Hill as Mr Tulliver. Helen Edmundson adapted it for the stage in 1994.
How to read it
- Give Book 1 its time. The aunts’ visit and the gypsy episode are comedy of the first rank, and everything later rests on them.
- Stop at the start of Book 4. The chapter on the Dodsons and the Rhone is the author’s statement of intent.
- Watch the river. Note each mention of flood, tide and drifting in the early books, and decide at the end whether the design persuades you.
- Find a good edition. The Gutenberg text linked here is complete but has no notes. Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics both annotate the dialect and references.
Read next
- George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72). The same hunger in a heroine with money and a whole town around her, and the same argument handled with far more control.
- George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861). Written straight after this one: the same country, but the past heals where here it drowns.
- Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853). Another clever, unattractive-seeming woman, and another ending that refuses to say what it means.
- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913). A novel that also begins in a half-sleep, by a reader who cried over this one.