Question 1

Is The Mill on the Floss autobiographical?

Accepted Answer

The Mill on the Floss is Eliot's most autobiographical novel, though it is fiction rather than memoir. Maggie Tulliver shares significant elements of Eliot's own childhood: the passionate intellectual girl in a provincial town who loves her brother intensely and is frustrated by a world that has no place for female intelligence. Eliot's own relationship with her brother Isaac — from whom she was estranged for decades after her decision to live with the married philosopher George Henry Lewes — is clearly present in the Tom-Maggie dynamic, though transmuted. The St. Ogg's community is based on Coventry and the surrounding Midlands countryside of Eliot's childhood. The novel also draws on Eliot's painful experience of being excluded from the respectable social world because of her relationship with Lewes, and on her understanding of the provincial English mind that she had escaped but could not forget.

Question 2

How does The Mill on the Floss end?

Accepted Answer

The Mill on the Floss ends in a flood — the River Floss overflows its banks and Maggie, attempting to rescue her brother Tom from the mill, finds him; they embrace for the first time in years, and the flood kills them both. The ending has divided readers and critics since the novel's publication in 1860. Some find it a catastrophe that feels artificial — a Victorian novelist's way of disposing of a heroine who has made herself socially impossible — while others find it the inevitable conclusion of the novel's central metaphor (the flood as the forces of passion and community that have overwhelmed Maggie throughout). Eliot herself described the ending as the only resolution she could find that was true to Maggie's character and to the relationship between Maggie and Tom. The novel is notable for refusing to save Maggie through conventional marriage or to condemn her through conventional punishment.

Question 3

What is the central conflict in The Mill on the Floss?

Accepted Answer

The central conflict of The Mill on the Floss is between Maggie Tulliver's nature — her passionate intelligence, her need for understanding and sympathy, her inability to conform to the provincial social world around her — and the provincial English society of St. Ogg's, which has no place for a woman like her. But the conflict is also internal: Maggie's love for her brother Tom, whose conventional, practical nature is opposite to hers but to whom she is deeply attached, means that she cannot simply reject the world Tom represents. Her tragedy is not simply that society rejects her but that she partly accepts society's judgment of herself, oscillating between defiance and self-abnegation in a way that prevents her from building a stable life. The novel is also about the particular suffering of intelligence in a woman, in a society that values female compliance over female capability, and that cannot decide whether to admire or condemn a woman who refuses to be what her world wants.

The Mill on the Floss Reading Order

Complete The Mill on the Floss Book List