Reading Order
The Mill on the Floss Reading Order
The Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot is the most autobiographical of her novels — the story of Maggie Tulliver, a passionate and intelligent girl growing up in provincial England in the 1820s-30s, who is trapped between her love for her brother Tom (who is everything she is not: practical, conventional, cold, successful) and her own hunger for a life that the world around her cannot offer to a girl of her class and period. Eliot wrote the novel at the same time she wrote The Mill on the Floss, and it draws directly on her own experience of growing up in the English Midlands, of her father and brother's incomprehension, of the provincial social world that was both everything she knew and everything she had to leave. The flood that ends the novel — in which Maggie and Tom die reconciled, Maggie's arms around her brother's neck — is one of the most controversial and most analyzed endings in Victorian fiction: some readers find it a capitulation, others a transfiguration.
Where to start
The Mill on the Floss (1860) — the complete novel. Best George Eliot reading order: The Mill on the Floss → Silas Marner → Adam Bede → Middlemarch → Daniel Deronda.
Complete The Mill on the Floss Book List
- 1Buy
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot·1860·The complete novel — Maggie Tulliver, Tom, Philip Wakem, and Stephen Guest. Eliot's most autobiographical novel; a good modern edition is the Penguin Classics with a useful introduction to the biographical and social context - 2Buy
Middlemarch
George Eliot·1871·The companion masterpiece — Dorothea Brooke and Lydgate in the Midlands town. The companion as 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 and ambition in a world that has no adequate use for her - 3Buy
Adam Bede
George Eliot·1859·The companion first novel — Hetty Sorrel, Adam Bede, and Dinah Morris. The companion investigation of the same English Midlands world: Hetty Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver are companion figures — both young women whose sexuality and beauty become their destruction in the provincial world that cannot accommodate their natures - 4Buy
Silas Marner
George Eliot·1861·The companion short novel — Silas Marner and Eppie. The companion investigation of the same Midlands world in its most concentrated form: a parable of isolation and community, loss and recovery, written immediately after The Mill on the Floss and as a kind of formal counterweight - 5Buy
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë·1847·The companion — Jane's survival and self-determination. 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, but where Jane's story is romance and liberation, Maggie's is tragedy and entrapment - 6Buy
Daniel Deronda
George Eliot·1876·Eliot's companion last novel — Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda. The companion investigation of the beautiful, self-willed young woman who is brought by her choices into a life that destroys her possibilities: Gwendolen Harleth is Maggie Tulliver grown up and given a plot that emphasizes the social dimensions of the same problem - 7Buy
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James·1881·James's companion investigation of the same figure — Isabel Archer, the intelligent American girl who must make her own way in the European social world. The companion investigation of the same central question (what becomes of a highly intelligent woman who wants more than her world offers?) but organized through the lens of social comedy rather than tragedy - 8Buy
Villette
Charlotte Brontë·1853·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
The Mill on the Floss — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Mill on the Floss about?
The Mill on the Floss is about Maggie Tulliver, a passionate and intelligent girl who grows up in the English Midlands in the 1820s-30s. Maggie loves her brother Tom with a love that is both the defining relationship of her life and the source of her greatest suffering: Tom is everything she is not (practical, conventional, cold, successful), and his inability to understand or forgive her becomes the tragedy at the novel's center. The novel follows Maggie through her childhood at Dorlcote Mill, her adolescent friendship with the crippled Philip Wakem (who loves her and who she cannot fully love back), her disastrous trip up the river with Stephen Guest (who loves her but whose attention violates her loyalty to her cousin Lucy), and her final reconciliation with Tom in the flood that kills them both. It is a novel about the impossibility of the life that a highly intelligent woman wanted in Victorian provincial England.
Is The Mill on the Floss autobiographical?
The Mill on the Floss is closely autobiographical. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) grew up in Warwickshire, the daughter of an estate manager named Robert Evans — a practical, successful, unintellectual man whom she loved deeply and who served as the basis for Mr. Tulliver and, to some extent, for Tom. Her own experience of being the intelligent, passionate girl in a provincial family that did not know what to do with her intelligence is directly reflected in Maggie's story. The rupture between Eliot and her own brother Isaac, who cut off relations with her when she began living openly with the married George Henry Lewes, is reflected in the rupture between Maggie and Tom when Tom learns of her relationship with Stephen Guest. Isaac Evans and Eliot were reconciled only in 1880, when she married John Cross — as Tom and Maggie are reconciled only in death.
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