The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
I
first encountered this wonderful novel in an obscure module studied in my first
year of my undergraduate degree called ‘writing and the self’. Much like
reading Thomas Hardy’s Far From the
Madding Crowd in GCSE, I felt like I was the only one in my class that
actually read The Mill on the Floss and
enjoyed it. Part of our assignment was to write a reading journal, a task I
enjoyed immensely, even if I was crazy enough to write it all by hand. Luckily,
one of my final entries in my diary was a General Review, which I will copy out
here.
Here be spoilers.
I
loved The Mill on the Floss. It’s
beautifully written, the imagery conjuring works of Eliot’s contemporaries
such as John Constable. This beauty is apparent throughout the entire book,
enabling the reader to see everything accurately and with great appreciation.
The
main character, Maggie, is strong-willed, and not wholly good, nor wholly evil,
making her easily relatable. I love her qualities and cleverness as a child.
Her relationship with brother Tom is sweet – sometimes too sweet – but still
lovely. The presentation of her aunts is more often than not satirical and
comical. Eliot captures the world through a child’s yes perfectly – always
referring to the senses and forever being subtle. Maggie’s childhood is my
favourite part of the book – as Maggie grows older, the book becomes more
serious, more melancholy.
Characterisation,
then, is one of Eliot’s strong points. Lucy is constantly compared to Maggie
as a prim and pristine girl who doesn’t have a bad bone in her body. We get the
sense that Eliot is subtly criticising rigid ways of life through such
techniques. Her attitudes are displayed very well – from the way she titles
each chapter to how she describes everything.
Eliot’s
subtleties within the novel make it complete. The foreshadowing of the flood is
used constantly through metaphors of water, preparing the reader for the
novel’s devastating close. Eliot manages to keep a sense of the whole while
picking out minor details for the reader’s perusal.
As
Maggie grows up, the novel takes a much more mature tone and references to
contemporary literature works as well as scientific ones are made. Eliot is a
master of free-indirect speech, enabling the reader to get right into the
character’s head.
There’s
not much I did not like in The Mill on
the Floss. Sometimes the dialogue between the characters was slightly
overwhelming and, as to be expected of a novel of that time, long historical
passages were quite boring. Eliot avoids mentioning a particular setting of the
novel which can be quite distracting to the imagination, and although we are
given subtle clues, it is hard to imagine what context the characters are in.
I
did not expect Maggie and a relatively new character Stephen Guest, to elope.
It makes you think how 19th century audiences would have reacted! It
certainly disrupted the almost ‘pretty’ tone of the novel, making it more
realistic, acting as a catalyst for the denouement.
The
conclusion echoes the beginning of the book because it’s so beautiful, but
contrasts to it because it is so sad. I was genuinely upset at the deaths of
Tom and Maggie, and I felt the time we had with them at the end was rushed –
maybe this is representative of the river washing all they know away. The conclusion
wraps up everything, though, and it’s stunning.
The Mill on the Floss is a perfect display of realism and
beautiful, articulate writing from a highly skilled author.
