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Books Like The Mill on the Floss
Victorian Novels Like The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss is one of the great Victorian novels of female intelligence frustrated — Maggie Tulliver's passionate nature in perpetual conflict with a provincial world that cannot accommodate her. These 8 novels share its sympathetic portrait of a woman too large for her world, its rich English provincial setting, and its moral seriousness.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Dorothea Brooke's idealism and Lydgate's ambitions in a Midlands provincial town — Eliot's masterpiece is the essential companion to The Mill on the Floss; where Maggie Tulliver is passionate and self-destructive, Dorothea is idealistic and self-suppressing, but both are portraits of female intelligence in conflict with what Victorian England expects women to want
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
A plain, intelligent, passionately independent governess who refuses to accept less than she deserves — Brontë's novel shares The Mill on the Floss's portrait of a girl who is 'too much' for her world, its provincial English setting, and its conviction that a woman's inner life is as rich and demanding as any man's; written when Eliot was still a teenager, it shaped the novel Eliot would write
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
A poor Dorset girl destroyed by the double standard of Victorian moral life — Hardy's tragic novel shares The Mill on the Floss's portrait of a woman whose nature places her in irreconcilable conflict with her society, its elegiac pastoral setting, and its unsentimental examination of what it costs a woman to have desires in a world that does not allow women to have them
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Isabel Archer's American independence tested by European sophistication and a disastrous marriage — James's novel is the international counterpart to The Mill on the Floss: another portrait of an exceptional woman whose desire to live fully leads her into a trap she cannot escape; where Maggie is destroyed by flood, Isabel is destroyed by the subtler currents of social manipulation
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Wives and Daughters
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Molly Gibson's intelligence and goodness in a country medical practice, and the disruption of her father's second marriage — Gaskell's final novel (unfinished at her death) shares The Mill on the Floss's portrait of a girl growing up in provincial England whose better nature is perpetually tested by her social world; warmer in tone than Eliot, but equally attentive to the moral texture of everyday life
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier's awakening to her own desires in 1890s New Orleans — Chopin's short novel shares The Mill on the Floss's central story of a woman whose inner nature is irreconcilable with her social world, and its refusal to punish its protagonist with a conventional moral ending; the American version of the same nineteeth-century tragedy
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A Life's Morning
by George Gissing
Emily Hood's painful collision between her independence and the social pressure that forces her into a marriage she does not want — Gissing's 1888 novel is less read than The Mill on the Floss but shares its central dynamic precisely: an intelligent woman in provincial England ground down by circumstances and social expectation; recommended for readers who want more Victorian fiction in Eliot's vein
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Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Bathsheba Everdene managing her Dorset farm and three very different suitors — Hardy's novel is the pastoral counterpart to The Mill on the Floss: another Victorian portrait of a spirited woman making her way in a world that underestimates her, set against the same rural English landscape and organized around the same question of whether a woman can live on her own terms
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