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    The Mill on the Floss
    The Mill on the Floss
    The Mill on the Floss
    Audiobook18 hours

    The Mill on the Floss

    Written by George Eliot

    Narrated by Wanda McCaddon

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    About this audiobook

    The Mill on the Floss, first published in 1860, tells the story of Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom as they grow from children to young adults in the small rural town of St. Ogg's, England. Intelligent and passionate, Maggie yearns to develop her mind and break free of the constraints of her provincial village. Though she loves her brother above anyone else, Tom's rigid, pragmatic personality often conflicts with Maggie's headstrong nature, with increasingly tragic consequences.

    A classic novel of development, The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot's most autobiographical work. Through the characters of Tom and Maggie, Eliot examines themes of gender, education, and personality formation, and her portrayal of the town of St. Ogg's is both a brilliant depiction of provincial narrow-mindedness and constraining social norms and an intelligent commentary on the changes to rural life brought about by the forces of industrialization.

    The Mill on the Floss is an enduring portrait of love, family, and individuals striving to create their own destinies, one whose words and characters resonate as vividly today as they did for Eliot's first readers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 25, 2011
    ISBN9781452672540
    Author

    George Eliot

    George Eliot was the pseudonym for Mary Anne Evans, one of the leading writers of the Victorian era, who published seven major novels and several translations during her career. She started her career as a sub-editor for the left-wing journal The Westminster Review, contributing politically charged essays and reviews before turning her attention to novels. Among Eliot’s best-known works are Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, in which she explores aspects of human psychology, focusing on the rural outsider and the politics of small-town life. Eliot died in 1880.

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    Reviews for The Mill on the Floss

    4/5

    62 ratings55 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I finished it! Less than 24 hours until the book club meets and I've finished this 600-page odyssey. (Forgive me if I spend a little time congratulating myself.) Anyway, this novel is primarily a brother and sister story, as the trials of Tom and Maggie Tulliver are chronicled and explored. Maggie certainly emerges as the more sympathetic sibling (a bias of the author, perhaps?), but the influence of society and gender roles weighs heavily on both Tom and Maggie throughout the novel. Nevertheless, George Eliot brings this novel to a perfect close and I have never felt so satisfied with such a sad conclusion.
    • 3/5
      It is easy to fall in love with the heroine of this story, Maggie Tulliver. Although she wants to be the ideal Victorian female, she can't help herself. She is bold, affectionate, impulsive and passionate and just can't fill the role of the passive and obedient daughter. What Maggie wants more than anything is the love and approval of her older brother Tom. Tom is the opposite of Maggie. He is responsible and steady and where Maggie's personality overflows with warmth and affection, Tom is more cold and deliberate. Although Tom loves his sister, he can't help but disapprove of her inappropriate behavior. The Mill on the Floss follows Maggie and Tom as they grow from children into adults. The Tulliver family has owned the mill for several generations, but Maggie and Tom's father makes some poor choices and ends up losing the mill due to a legal dispute. Maggie and Tom's lives change as they have to work hard to survive, Tom entering business on the docks and Maggie working as a teacher. Although Maggie works hard to help out and be the obedient daughter, she continues to disappoint her family by first falling in love with the son of the man who caused the Tulliver bankruptcy and then falling in love with a man who is betrothed to her cousin.



      Although I enjoyed the story and the writing, I was so disappointed with the ending. Maggie gives up everything to try to be that obedient daughter and finally get Tom's approval. It almost seemed like the 'moral' to this story is that reason is better than heart or passion. And Tom - what a smug condescending idiot! So undeserving of a sister like Maggie.
    • 5/5
      This is the second of Eliot's books I have read (the first being Middlemarch), and I found the reading as compelling as the first. Eliot has a power of evoking characters that literally live off the pages as you read them; they make you laugh, weep and fume at what life tosses their way, much as the waves and floods of the Floss. The ending, I found, to be poignant rather than a cop-out. Whilst I too would have loved a happy ending where Maggie finds social vindication and true marital and lifelong bliss, it's all too unfortunate that life doesn't end that way. Eliot's brief but powerful portrayal of St Ogg's women and their condemnation of Maggie's so-called sins, highlights the impossibility of such an ending.While Eliot does indulge in an obvious parallel with the Virgin myth, and some might call this 'convenient', I found it critical to the enlightenment of Tom's infamous narrow mind. Debatable though the denouement may be, I found the experience of reading this work entirely engrossing and enjoyable from beginning to end. You can't help but care for the characters that Eliot creates, she is a brilliant artist at her usual best in this work.
    • 3/5
      After beautiful opening descriptions, an energetic plot, beginning and concluding with an embrace in the Floss, is slowed to tedium by the endless Tulliver and Dodson womens' conversations and their fixations.Maggie Tulliver showed a wonderful rebellious strength in a family with an often cruel older brother, a flighty mother,and an over indulgent father. Unfortunately for her and George Eliot's readers, she descends into a pointless chasmof self-chastising morality, broken only when she overcomes pity to agree to marry one man, then falls in love withher cousin's boyfriend. The only mystery in the predictable plot comes when Maggie and Tom, river people who knew better, take a rowboat out into a flood.
    • 4/5
      One of my favorite classic novels.
    • 4/5
      This is a beautifully written novel. Its got some journeyman flaws, its a little uneven and lumpy in a few spots, but on the whole its exceptionally well drawn, all the characters are wonderful and it has an unshakeable sense of place, of being rooted in all the complex interlinking minutiae that make up the ecology of a real landscape and a real society.

      So why four stars? Because eventually I just got fed up with watching people kick Maggie Tulliver around. If she'd ever once gotten even a little bit angry with any of the many mostly well meaning people who treat her like complete crap, if she'd ever even tried to fight back, even if she failed, well I'd be so on her side. But as it is, its like reading an exceptionally beautifully written Mr Bill show. Watch Sluggo and Mr Hand take away absolutely everything that makes Maggie's life worth having one by one by one, and stomp on her head in passing. Oh NOOOO Mr Bill!

      At some point, for me, it just becomes too melodramatic, too "may I have some more sir," and I end up just irritated with the character and the author. Get up and DO something woman! Stop letting everybody kick you around the landscape, what are you, a punching bag?

      YMMV*

      *Your mileage may vary.
    • 4/5
      This is an epic Northern tale of a chalk and cheese brother and sister, Maggie and Tom Tulliver, trying to make their way in the world. Much of the time I feel they are both round pegs in square holes, neither cut out for what conventional life has in store for them. However brother and sisterly love seems to be the thread that binds them together thoughout their entwined and estranged lives to the dramatic climax of their story.
    • 5/5
      Maggie's story is tragic, and the ending left me in tears. She was a character that acted impulsively, and drew my sympathies. Her brother Tom may have been annoying and sometimes cruel, but he was her connection to her past ... who she was, and with her in the end. The end...no longer divided, Maggie and Tom will be forever immortalized by unconditional love, despite their dysfunction.
    • 4/5
      I read this when I was studying in England and I have distinct memories of sitting on benches in Regents Park with my library copy. The copy I was reading was one of those charming small British hardcovers with thin pages. I can practically feel the pages, the sun on my face, and the light wind tossing my hair around as I think about it. I'm sure that contributes to my fondness for the book.
    • 4/5
      What a pleasure it is to read the novels of George Eliot. The sheer intelligence of the author shines on every page. In this, her second novel following closely after Adam Bede, she draws on her own experience to create a world of characters surrounding her hero & heroine, Tom and Maggie Tulliver.The story develops at a leisurely pace with the first two books devoted to the childhood of Maggie and Tom. As Tom goes off to be tutored, Maggie must stay at home and their lives slowly diverge until in subsequent books, as their father's world disintegrates in debt, they are found on opposite sides with their filial love tested again and again. One of the most impressive aspects of the novel is the complexity of these characters as created by Eliot. Tom distinguishes himself at the trading firm of his Uncle Deane and matures into a confident and courageous young man, repaying the debts of his father. Yet, his character is flawed in both his inflexibility and his inability to appreciate the needs of his sister Maggie. Maggie, who is significantly more intelligent than Tom, and self-taught, has developed from a somewhat over-emotional young girl into a sort of Christian ascetic based on her reading of Thomas a Kempis. She is forbidden friendship with Philip Waken, the son of the lawyer who bought her father's mill, and is prevented from developing the potential that is central to her character. The denouement of the novel leads it down the path of the tragic side of life if not true tragedy, but the complexity of the characters and realism of the world in which they live continues to impress.
    • 3/5
      Maggie Tulliver, who is age seven when the story opens, lives at Dorlcote Mill on the River Ripple at its junction with the River Floss near the village of St. Ogg’s in England, with her father, who owns the mill, mother, and older brother Tom. The novel spans a period of ten to fifteen years, beginning with Tom’s and Maggie’s childhood and including her father’s ongoing battles with a lawyer named Wakem, the Tullivers’ consequent bankruptcy resulting in the loss of the mill, and Mr. Tulliver’s untimely death. Tom has been in school with Philip Wakem, the lawyer’s hunchbacked, sensitive, and intellectual son, and Maggie has grown fond of Philip, seeing him secretly. To help repay his father’s debts, Tom leaves his schooling to enter a life of business, but in his hatred of the Wakems, he forbids Maggie’s seeing Philip, and she languishes in the impoverished Tulliver home, renouncing the world after reading Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Some years later, Tom has been successful and able to restore the family’s former estate. Lucy has been away teaching school but returns to visit with her cousin, Lucy Deane. Her acquaintance with Philip is renewed and he still loves her, but Stephen Guest, a young socialite in St. Ogg's who is Lucy’s fiancé, is also attracted to her. Maggie enjoys the clandestine attentions of Stephen, but when he substitutes for the sick Philip in taking her on a boat ride and proposes that they stop in Mudport, and get married, she rejects him and makes her way back to St. Ogg's, where, rejected by her brother Tom and almost everyone else except her mother, Tom’s friend Bob Jakin and his family, in whose home she takes lodgings, and the minister, Dr. Kenn, who engages her as governess for his children, she lives for a brief period as an outcast, though she does reconcile with both Philip and Lucy. When the flood comes, Maggie sets out in one of Bob’s boats to rescue Tom, and together they head to rescue Lucy, but their boat capsizes and the two drown in an embrace, thus giving the book its Biblical subtitle, “In their death they were not divided.” I have always liked Eliot’s Silas Marner because it is, in the final analysis, a tale of redemption. However, The Mill on the Floss is not primarily a tale of redemption. In fact, the book is somewhat autobiographical in that it reflects the disgrace that the author herself felt while involved in a lengthy relationship with a married man, George Henry Lewes, although there are differences. No actual immorality is portrayed in the book, and towards the end, Maggie does make the right choice. There are a little bad language and some references to drinking alcohol, using tobacco, and dancing. Biblical quotations and allusions abound throughout, but I am not sure that the book represents a truly Biblical worldview. A certain degree of fatalistic determinism is at play throughout the novel—in fact, on one occasion Maggie says, “Our life is determined for us”—although Maggie’s ultimate choice not to marry Stephen demonstrates a final triumph of free will. Some latent feminism also occurs in that the cultural norms of her community seem to deny Maggie her intellectual and spiritual growth. Many of Eliot’s observations about the nature of people and society are interesting, with some of which you may agree and others you may not, but occasionally her social commentary goes on and on to the point of becoming boring. Like The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the right hands The Mill on the Floss could be used to teach a good lesson on not being judgmental, but due to the “titillating” nature of the story I would recommend that it not be inflicted on anyone under age eighteen.
    • 5/5
      This story, written in 1860, by George Eliot is a story of two siblings, Tom and Maggie, who live with their mother and father at the mill on the River Floss. I was impressed with the the imagery that Eliot was able to create with words. I could see the mill and river when she described them. I also was impressed with the character development. I so wanted to love Maggie and hate Tom but just when I thought I was right, the author could turn it around by giving you positives for Tom and negatives for Maggie. These characters were both ones you could feel sympathy for, though much easier to with Maggie than Tom. The author also gave us a picture of family dynamics and faults, community positives and negatives, and the difficulties of being a female in this time in history. The plot is full of symbolism with the mill, the Floss, St. Oggs, Maggie's eyes. The themes; loss of innocence, communal verses individual interest, gender disparity, difficulty of choice, renunciation and sacrifice. Example of how the author could paint a picture; “These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows - such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.”A quote that looks at the loss of innocence from childhood; “The two slight youthful figures soon grew indistinct on the distant road - were soon lost behind the projecting hedgerow.They had gone forth together into their new life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.”
    • 2/5
      While I immediately disliked the way everyone except her father treated Maggie, I was mildly enjoying this classic about the struggles of a middle class family in Victorian England until the final 2 books (about the final 20%). I found Maggie's behavior in these final sections so intensely irritating that it ruined the book for me.This is the 3rd George Eliot book I have read & overall I haven't been a fan. Guess I will skip Daniel Deronda and Adam Bede (both on the Guardian's list) at least for the near future!
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this. The opening chapters are very funny and Maggie is adorable. I like it when she pushes Lucy into the pond and how this and other early things pre-figure events later in the novel. Very clever. I liked how the aunts act as a Greek chorus early on, later replaced by the authorial voice. It must have been a very personal novel for Eliot to write. I heard that her brother refused to speak to her for 20 years, but she never let's herself be overcome by emotion. My sister refused to speak to me for 12 years for the same reasons.
    • 4/5
      This has to be my least favourite George Eliot novel. It is just so depressing all the way through. The Tulliver siblings lose their home and social standing due to their father's litigiousness. Then Maggie, unable to marry the man she has promised herself to, falls for the "coxcomb", Stephen Guest. Nothing good happens to any one and all the characters make disappointing choices. The characterization is, as always in Eliot, excellent, in that each person is made up of a complex mixture of good and evil, wisdom and foolishness. I sent a long time thinking about Maggie and her failings and puzzling decisions and about Tom and his narrow-mindedness and even about Philip and the weight he placed on a promise drawn from a very young, inexperienced girl, so it clearly is brilliantly-written, but the hopelessness of the whole thing prevents me from giving it more stars.
    • 4/5
      Spirited Maggie Tulliver grows up on a struggling mill by the riverside town of St. Ogg’s and struggles with her relationships with her family, her older brother Tom, a beloved friend who happens to be the son of her father’s enemy, and a charismatic but unattainable suitor. This is the first George Eliot book I’ve read and it won’t be my last, for I am blown away by Eliot’s remarkably, almost painfully, accurate insights into human nature and the social condition. Maggie is like a modern heroine caught between tensions of the old and new, a girl who doesn’t fit the mold of the ideal young woman and yet craves acceptance and praise from the men in her life. The writing is bold and flowing, the characters flawed yet endearing.There are many other more scholarly things I could say about this book (for we had an excellent discussion about it in class), but I would’ve loved it had I picked it up on my own. It’s got all the cleverness and emotional resonance of an Austen novel, and the intricacies of the Victorian realist genre. I have to admit I was thrown and angry at the way Eliot ended this novel, but until that point I was fully invested in the characters’ outcomes, and I can now simply chuckle at all the different ways I can academically interpret that infuriating ending. A must-read for Victorian lit!
    • 2/5
      I really expected to love George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss -- I adored Middlemarch and Victorian novels are really my genre. But boy, I really struggled with this book. The story follows Maggie Tulliver, who wants to be loved and seeks approval from her family who is reluctant to give it. She grows up in find love in too many places but still can't find approval. There was a bizarre twist of a ending that really didn't make a whole lot of sense in terms of the rest of story.Overall, I just found this book incredibly dull. Eliot's long expositions did nothing for me and I honestly had trouble staying awake for more an a few pages. It got a bit interesting in the middle, then fell apart again. Just a dud of a book for me.
    • 5/5
      I suspect between this novel and Middlemarch, George Eliot is becoming my favorite nineteenth-century novelist. I wish she were still alive so that I could write her fan letters.

      The Mill on the Floss is funny and moving and philosophical. Eliot does so many different things well; she's witty and detached, and then she writes a love scene that makes your knees go wobbly. Middlemarch struck me the same way - it's incredibly romantic, and then it does things with that romance, crazy thematic plot things, that sometimes make you feel like the author has punched you in the stomach.

      I think George Eliot and Joss Whedon would probably get along.

      The novel is also cool because it's sort of a novel about adultery without actually being about adultery. It feels very modern and unflinching, the more so because George Eliot actually spent much of her adult life in a happy but socially-isolating relationship out of wedlock, so she had perspective on The System.

      The last couple hundred pages are incredibly intense, perhaps the more so because I read them in one go on a very long train ride, most of which was spent on the edge of my (not very comfortable) seat. It's one of those novels whose ending is absolutely unguessable and yet feels vitally important; "Holy crap," I asked myself, "how is this going to end, and will I be able to live a happy and well-adjusted life after I finish it?"

      I'm still working on that happy and well-adjusted part. The ending... well, is it ever an ending. Words like "mythic" and "apocalyptic" do not give it justice. I'm still not sure how I feel about it - in some ways she gave me just the ending I didn't want, but she did it in such a way that I had to admire. Also, it is very, very intriguing and makes me want to write essays about it, which is usually a good thing.

      Great characters, great plot, great themes. A very well-rounded novel.
    • 5/5
      I simply love George Elliots writing. She draws a picture of life in an age where social lives were changing, where women were daring to be counted by whatever means it took.
    • 5/5
      I got this book out as i thought, oh, i better read a classic as i hadn't read one for a while. I loved it! It is about Maggie, a frustrated girl who feels there should be more to life than the path she feels is mapped out for her. Her mother is rather vacuous, concerned with reputation and her father is feckless. She has a strong relationship with her brother Tom. It is difficult to sum up the storyline succinctly but Maggie's father loses a legal battle over the ownership of the river which leads him to financial ruin, in the meantime Maggie develops a friendship with Philip. Her brother discovers their friendship and makes Maggie swear she will not see Philip any more as he is the son of the lawyer who won who sent their father into financial ruin. Their father dies and Maggie goes away to teach. Some time later she returns to visit her cousin Lucy and she meets her fiance Stephen, a friend of Philip and they become helplessly attracted to one another. Maggie takes a boat ride with him and is on the verge of running away with him when she resolves to return. After this, Maggie is considered a fallen woman, disowned by Tom. Stephen takes all the responsibility and she is forgiven by Lucy and Philip, however Tom continues to shun her until the fateful night that the river floods, Maggie rows to rescue Tom however the water is too powerful and they drown in each others arms. I became so immersed in this book and moved at the level of understanding and eventual forgiveness in the characters, also Maggies stoic acceptance that she must live her life with the burden of her actions weighing upon her is so sad. Reunited at last Tom and Maggie return to the river that dictated the course of their lives. Well written, deeply moving,a skilled and beautiful book. I had tears in my eyes at the end...
    • 3/5
      I read this a little too long ago to quite remember it well. I have an image of the mill being swept away by the end of the novel but I don't remember what it all meant.

      I remember there was a sentence about a third of the way through the novel describing the state of the marriage between an aunt and uncle of the protagonist. The sentence was about a page long and started out indicating that the uncle was in the garden and as in a long spiral seemed to draw out the psychology of the marriage between the aunt and uncle and the aunt's philosophy of marriage and the uncle's manner of coping with his wife. It left me delirious. Twice in my life when I have walked into a book store that stocked "The Mill of the Floss" I have looked for and found this sentence. It bolsters me to still be entertained in rereading it even though I have no idea what the novel means.
    • 4/5
      classic writing not read it for many years though
    • 4/5
      Very descriptive and verbose, but overall a good story. Similar to Hardy or Fielding in writing style. Distinct sense of time and unusual in its setting for the time period. Pastoral, but upper middle class- almost reminds me of the British TV show "Keeping up Appearances"- oddly enough.
    • 3/5
      This book starts strong; with quirky, believable characters and a poignant setting that was obviously a well-loved memory of the author's childhood. I frequently laughed out loud at some antic of Maggie's or a description of her woodenheaded, morally upright Aunt Glegg.

      Once the characters grew up, however, it degenerated into a tragic romance with Maggie as `Mary Sue', and the ending! - don't get me started.
    • 4/5
      I think, to begin, that Maggie did not ever love Stephen. Obviously, she never loved Phillip. The love story of the book was between Maggie and Tom. I don't mean any kind of icky illegal brother/sister whatever. I do think that if she had had a larger sphere of experience, more people to know, more exposure to the world, she would have found someone to feel truly "in love" with, in the way that Phillip and Stephen were in love with her. In the passionate, married, adult kind of way. However, she never did find that kind of love. Her love for her brother was the only one that was true. That was eternal, endless, that she would give up everything for, that would have been completely sustaining for her. Look at the structure of the love story for Tom and Maggie. They were together, they were separated by events and circumstances, they came together in the end -- it's a classic story arc for a very traditional love story, except that it's as if the genders are reversed.When I say it's like a gender reversal... I mean a reversal of the traditional stuff that you expect to happen in a romance novel. Tom is the one who rejects Maggie for being "bad" as he pursues his relentless morals and virtues. He sends her away, corrects her and refuses her for all her traits that he sees as flaws. Ultimately, as they come together at the end, he sees (I think) that she was essentially herself, and that the flaws were actually her consistency with her own strange (to him) nature. So, Tom is kind of the girl, and Maggie is kind of the man who redeems himself at the end through a heroic, pure act. And they die in each others arms. I mean... come on. The inscription on the tombstone of their shared grave is: "In death they were not parted." That's what you'd expect to see on the grave of two lovers. Stephen and Phillip are just distractions... obstacles and problems. THey aren't really love interests. They're things that keep Maggie from Tom, things she does to disappoint him and alienate him. You know, this story kind of reminds me of A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy. I have to reread that one, I guess. There was some kind of a train ride or something, reminding me of Maggie's float down the river with Stephen. I just can't remember how it all went together. This is why I need to reread these books. A few thoughts on the characters:It seems to me like Eliot's task is to take these outwardly simple, perhaps typical characters, turn them inside out and examine their hidden complexities. This is, I think, a common desire for all fiction writers, but Eliot takes her cases from a class of people she herself says would be outwardly kind of crass and uninteresting:It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of those wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of misery and crime; without that primitive, rough simplicity of wants, that hard, submissive, ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling-out of what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without side-dishes. It reminds me of DH Lawrence, in a way, who made me doubt how incredibly complex and sensitive and insightful all these coal miners could really be. Beyond just the vocabulary, but to have the time, the attention, and the innate desire to feel things soooo so deeply and be so overcome by things like moons and whatnot. I guess he should know, having been the son of one, but still. I certainly don't have any desire to feel anything deeply. Maybe because I'm one of those awful, over-educated people who know nothing but extinct languages and who can't lift a bale of hay. Although, I could lift one, if one were here. I might even still be able to lift two. But never mind. Dickens had caricatures, and Eliot also has characters who are objects of sarcasm or ridicule, but they also have complexity. Take Aunt Glegg, who was sooo horrid and strict with the children early on in the book. The passages depicting her martyrdom, her conversations with her longsuffering husband, and her self-imposed exiles to her room accompanied by a book about saints and a bowl of gruel -- are hilarious. However, it is this Aunt, by the same rules and internal system that made her awful initially, who is most generous and protective of Maggie later on, after the disgrace. That's what makes these characters good, and real -- they are not just meant to be lessons for us, or walking ideologies to be criticized, but they are living under human systems, each to their own. Maggie has hers too. And Tom. Both could have made different decisions to make their lives easier, but they strictly adhered to their own way.
    • 5/5
      What a pleasure this book was. Oh Maggie you're such an annoying but endearing thing why didn't you just marry the gorgeous Stephen, you had to let your silly morals get in the way and don't we love you for it in the end. I was captivated to see how it could ever end and would my longing for Maggie and Stephen to be together be satiated or not, you'll have to read it to find out.
    • 5/5
      [SPOILER] This book really caught me. The super-charged melodramtic ending really hit me. The utter rapidity of its all-embracing solution jolted me: "The boat reappeared--but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted, living through again in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together." In this line, the whole book appears as a carefully sculpured whole--the long and rather dreary opening chapters are seen as an essential part to create the drama of the closing. The impact of the closing is so vivid, that the one-age Conclusion at first disturbed: but even it is just right: the following I thought overwhelming: "Near that brick grave there was a tomb erected, very soon after the flood, for two bodies that were found in close embrace; and it was visited at different moments by two men who both felt that their keenest joy and keenest sorrow were forever buried there." What a story--I now will certainly have to read more Geroge Eliot.
    • 1/5
      I am a little surprised by this book's high rating, as I consider myself well-read and well-educated, and therefore (supposedly) capable of discerning and appreciating fine literature. However, The Mill on the Floss was one of the most painful reading experiences of my life (the other being a textbook I had to read for one of my classes). It was tedious, overblown, vacuous...in my opinion, of course.
    • 2/5
      Story of a family/girl's life. It drug on for far too long. Father loses mill after a lawsuit. Son and daughter have to leave school. Son has to support family. Father dies in disgrace. Daughter falls in love with cousins love. Girl disgraces family. No happy ending for any of the characters.
    • 4/5
      I quite enjoyed this... until the ending. The terrible, terrible ending. Seriously, "And then Maggie woke up, and it was all a dream" would have been ten times better.I'm also left wondering whether Eliot, like Dickens, got paid by the word.