The Mill on the Floss

George Eliot

Feb 2003 · Penguin UK

About this ebook

Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring 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 her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother, a close friend who is also the son of her family's worst enemy, and a charismatic but dangerous suitor. With its poignant portrayal of sibling relationships, The Mill on the Floss is considered George Eliot's most autobiographical novel; it is also one of her most powerful and moving.

Ratings and reviews

My first George Eliot novel. I was well aware of her reputation as one of the giants of 19th century literature. Now I know why. The Mill on the Floss is one of the most intelligently written and moving novels I have ever read. Eliot's mastery at illuminating the emotional and psychological climate of her characters and weaving it poignantly into the narrative via metaphor and the like, is nothing short of astonishing. The final meeting between Maggie and Lucy, and of course the unforgettable ending had this reader reduced to tears. What a book.

About the author

Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) (1819-80) was a philosopher, journalist and translator before she became a novelist, her first stories being published in 1856. She led an unconventional life, co-editing the liberal journal Westminster Review for three years and living with the married man and philosopher George Henry Lewes. Her novels are among the greatest of the nineteenth century

A. S. Byatt was born in 1936 and educated in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge, of which she is now an Honorary Fellow. She taught English at University College, London, from 1972 to 183. She appears regularly on radio and television, and writes academic articles and literary journalism both in England and abroad. Her fiction includes The Shadow of the Sun; The Game; The Virgin in the Garden; Still Life; Sugar and Other Stories; Possession, winner of the 1990 Booker Prize and the 1990 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction prize; the novella Angels and Insects; The Matisse Stories; The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, a collection of fairy stories; Babel Tower; Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice; The Biographers Tale; A Whistling Woman and The Little Black Book of Stories. Her work has been translated into 28 languages. Her critical work includes Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Unruly Times (on Wordsworth and Coleridge) and, with the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré, Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers. Passions of the Mind, a collection of critical essays, appeared in 1991; a new collection, On Histories and Stories, appeared in 2000; Portraits in Fiction, a study of the relationship between painting and the novel, and (ed.) Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, by George Eliot, in 2001. She was appointed DBE in 1999.