The Mill on the Floss

About the Book

George Eliot published The Mill on the Floss in 1860, drawing on her own childhood in the English Midlands for the novel's setting and for the portrait of its protagonist, Maggie Tulliver. Maggie grows up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss, in a family divided between the impractical intelligence of her father and the respectable provincial conventionality of her Dodson aunts. Her brother Tom, conventional and determined, is the person whose approval she wants most and cannot secure. She is given a rudimentary education that does not match her intellectual appetite, falls into a complicated attachment with Philip Wakem, the hunchbacked son of the lawyer her father considers an enemy, and later into a more dangerous attraction to Stephen Guest, who is engaged to her cousin Lucy.

Themes and Significance

Eliot uses Maggie's story to examine what happens to exceptional intelligence when it has no legitimate outlet, a problem Eliot herself had navigated and which she understood at a structural level as gendered. Maggie's tragedy is not simply romantic; it is the convergence of several forces: a social code that offers women no recognized category for intellectual ambition, a family structure that prioritizes Tom's conventional success over her more significant capacities, and her own tendency to make decisions based on immediate feeling rather than long-term calculation.

Why Read It Today?

The flood ending, in which Maggie dies reconciled with Tom, drowned in the Floss when she goes out to rescue him during a catastrophic inundation, has divided readers since 1860. Eliot gives Maggie the death that her society has been preparing for her throughout the novel; what she also gives her is the one thing the novel suggests she always wanted most, which is Tom's recognition that she is someone worth dying with. Whether that is consolation or tragedy is a question the ending refuses to settle, and the ambiguity is probably intentional.