Recommendations
Books Like The Mill on the Floss
Best books to read after The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Readers who love The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot are drawn to its combination of the most autobiographical and emotionally direct of her novels, the tragedy of Maggie Tulliver's entrapment between her love for her brother and her own hunger for a life the provincial world cannot offer, and the controversial flood ending. They want works that deal with the intelligent passionate woman in Victorian England, the female Bildungsroman, and the specific texture of English provincial life that Eliot draws from her own Warwickshire childhood.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The companion masterpiece — Dorothea Brooke and Lydgate. The fully realized version of the same investigation: where Maggie's story ends in tragedy before she can find the life the world cannot give her, Dorothea's story is the investigation of what that search actually involves for a woman of intelligence in a world that has no adequate use for her
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Adam Bede
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion first novel — the English Midlands pastoral world. Both novels are set in the same Warwickshire world and investigate the same relationship between the passionate young woman and the social world that cannot accommodate her nature
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
The companion — Jane's survival and self-determination in Victorian England. The companion investigation of the intelligent, passionate girl in Victorian provincial England who must make her own way: both Jane and Maggie are women who refuse to be defined by the constraints around them
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Villette
by Charlotte Brontë
The companion — Lucy Snowe's isolation and survival. The companion as the most psychologically intense of the Victorian female Bildungsromane: Lucy Snowe's combination of extreme intelligence, emotional repression, and passionate inner life is the Victorian equivalent of Maggie Tulliver's predicament
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Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion last novel — Gwendolen Harleth's education out of egoism. Gwendolen Harleth is Maggie Tulliver grown up and given a plot that emphasizes the social dimensions of the same problem: what becomes of a beautiful, self-willed woman who makes catastrophic choices?
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's companion investigation of the same figure — Isabel Archer's disastrous marriage to Gilbert Osmond. The companion as the late Victorian version of the same central question (what becomes of a highly intelligent woman who wants more than her world offers?) organized through the lens of social comedy and international settings
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's companion investigation of the beautiful passionate country girl destroyed by the intrusion of the modern world. The companion as the late Victorian tragic version of the same investigation: both Maggie Tulliver and Tess Durbeyfield are women whose nature and sensitivity make them especially vulnerable to the social forces around them
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Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's companion pastoral — Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors. The companion investigation of the same English rural world: the beautiful, independent young woman who must navigate the men who love her and the social world that cannot quite accommodate her independence
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