The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss is a novel by English author George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans, first published in three volumes on 4 April 1860 by William Blackwood and Sons.

Spanning a period of 10 to 15 years, the novel details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, siblings who grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss.

[1] The novel begins in the late 1820s or early 1830s – several historical references place the events in the book after the Napoleonic Wars but before the Reform Act 1832.

She passes through a period of tough spirituality, during which she renounces the world, motivated by her reading of Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ.

The relationship they forge is founded partly in Maggie's heartfelt pity for broken and neglected human beings but it also serves as an outlet for her intellectual romantic desires.

This includes long hours conversing and playing music with Lucy's suitor, Stephen Guest, a prominent St Ogg's resident.

When Maggie and Stephen find themselves floating down the river, negligent of the distance they have covered, he proposes that they board a passing boat to the next substantial city, Mudport and get married.

They are taken on board and during the trip to Mudport, Maggie struggles between her love for Stephen and her duties to Philip and Lucy, which were established when she was poor, isolated and dependent on them for what good her life contained.

A certain determinism is at play throughout the novel, from Mr Tulliver's inability to keep himself from "going to law", and thereby losing his patrimony and bankrupting his family, to the series of events that sets Maggie and Stephen down the river and past the point of no return.

On the other hand, Maggie's ultimate choice not to marry Stephen, and to suffer both the privation of his love and the ignominy of their botched elopement demonstrates a final triumph of free will.

"[5] The story was adapted as a film, The Mill on the Floss, in 1937, and as a BBC series in 1978 starring Christopher Blake, Pippa Guard, Judy Cornwell, Ray Smith and Anton Lesser.

Plaque in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire , noting it as the model for St Ogg's: "one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds or the winding galleries of the white ants; a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land."
Bintry Watermill , which depicted Dorlcote Mill in the 1997 TV series.
Tom and Maggie Tulliver
Reunion of Maggie and Lucy (W. St. John Harper, 1889)
Maggie Tulliver, by Frederick Stuart Church