The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

I had been meaning to read The Mill on the Floss since December of 2023 when I read Michael Cunningham’s novel Day, where he has one character recommend to another character that she re-read The Mill on the Floss, reporting that he had just returned to it and discovered, “It’s even better than I remembered.” I had not read any of George Eliot at the time but before I got to The Mill on the Floss I read Middlemarch, because I already owned a copy, and I found it excellent. I suppose just because Middlemarch is such a big book, and The Mill on the Floss is also big, and there are so many other books to read, I didn’t get to The Mill on the Floss until now. Then, as I was starting on it, about a month ago, I mentioned to my husband’s step-sister who was visiting, that I had started it, and she made a face and indicated I needn’t bother. After finishing it, I have to say I’m glad to have read it, but I agree with her dismissive assessment rather than the positive recommendation of the character in Cunningham’s novel. I certainly won’t bother to re-read it.

The setting is about 1830, 30 years before Eliot published the novel in 1860. Middlemarch would come out eleven years later. The main character is Maggie Tulliver. At the novel’s start she’s a young girl, about nine years old. Maggie lives with her older brother Tom, age thirteen, and her mother and father outside of an English village named St. Ogg. The father manages a mill on their property on the river Floss. The mother, Bessy Tulliver, is one of four sisters of the Dobson family, all married. The Dobson sisters are well characterized: hypochondriac Mrs. Deanne, accommodating Mrs. Pullet, scolding and imperious Mrs. Glegg. Mr. Tulliver also has a married sister. Mrs. Deanne has a daughter about Maggie’s age named Lucy, who becomes prominent later in the story. The Tulliver family are comfortable, but not rich.

Maggie is highly intelligent but is given only the minimal practical and social schooling appropriate for a girl. She educates herself by reading whatever books she finds. Tom, on the other hand, is sent to a tutor and given a classical education that he is totally unfit for. Maggie is devoted to her brother. But Tom often abuses Maggie’s affection and belittles her aspirations. When Maggie visits her brother at the boarding house where he’s being tutored, she meets Phillip Wakem, a few years older than Tom. Phillip has two strikes against him. First, he is physically deformed, having a hunchback of some sort. Second, he is the son of a lawyer in St. Ogg that Mr. Tulliver considers a rascal. Maggie, though, finds Phillip sensitive and thoughtful. He encourages her self-education. She’s especially touched when her brother Tom injures his foot during some foolish play with a sword and Phillip cares for him.

The conflict between the Tullivers and the Wakems increases when a man who owns a farm on the Floss upriver from the Tullivers endeavors to tap the river to irrigate his fields, threatening to ruin the mill business. Mr. Tulliver takes him to court. The farmer hires Wakem to represent him. Mr. Tulliver loses the lawsuit and with the legal costs he also loses his property; the mill is returned to the bank when Tulliver can’t pay the mortgage; the Tulliver’s belongings are sold off; the family goes bankrupt. To make the matter worse, Tulliver falls from his horse the day of the judgement and is temporarily paralyzed and loses his memory. When he recovers, he finds that Wakem himself has bought the mortgage on the mill, and Wakem is now Tulliver’s boss.

Young Tom steps up and goes into business. His half-hearted classical education is no use to him, but he gets a job in a warehouse associated with his Uncle Deanne’s trading business. Tom is successful and starts to save money toward paying off the debts the family owes to creditors. Maggie takes up sewing to make a little money for the family and from a book of spiritual advice by Thomas A Kempis attempts to renounce the world. Then she runs into Philip Wakem one day as she’s walking in the woods near their home. The meeting is not accidental as Philip has been looking for her, remembering their earlier friendship. Maggie enjoys seeing him but is torn because of her father’s enmity toward the Wakems. She continues to meet Philip in the woods but clandestinely, and he reawakens her desire to explore and appreciate the world. Philip falls in love with Maggie, and eventually confesses his love to her. Maggie says she loves him, too, while also acknowledging the impossibility of their being together.

Tom’s business success is given even a larger boost when a childhood friend named Bob Jakim, gives Tom the opportunity to partner with him in some trading business of their own. Within a few years Tom has made enough money to pay off the family debts leading to a triumphant scene where he shares the good news with his proud father, but, as it turns out, on the same day when he is ready to restore the family honor he discovers that Maggie has been secretly meeting with Philip and dishonoring the family. He forbids Maggie to ever see Phillip again and Maggie agrees.

But the triumph of paying off the family debts is not long enjoyed. Coming home from the town meeting where the family’s debts are paid off, Mr. Tulliver encounters the senior Wakem on the road. They trade insults. Wakem falls from his horse and Tulliver jumps down and begins to horsewhip him. Tulliver is restrained by Maggie who happens upon the scene. Tulliver is saved from being arrested for assault only because the stress re-awakens the injury from his previous fall from a horse and he dies soon after, but not before he has Tom record in the family Bible his hatred for Wakem and his instruction that Tom will never have anything to do with Wakem and will do what he can in the future to take revenge.

The novel is divided into seven books grouped into three volumes. That’s the end of the second volume, book five.

Volume three, and book six, jumps the action forward a few years. Maggie is now eighteen. Following her father’s death, she’s gone away to take a position as a school mistress. Tom is increasingly successful in business and is living in St. Ogg in a room he rents from Bob Jakim, who is now married. Mrs. Tulliver is living with her sister Mrs. Deanne and helping her manage her home. Maggie has come back to St. Ogg to stay with her cousin Lucy (Mrs. Deanne’s daughter) for a few weeks and enjoy a holiday.

Here the novel takes a radical turn that makes it feel as though an entirely different novel has been appended to the first half. Maggie has become a beauty. Her cousin Lucy is being courted by a new character named Stephen Guest. He’s the son of the partner in Mr. Deanne’s trading business. Stephen is presented as handsome and charming, but inconsequential. Although Stephen and Lucy are just shy of officially engaged, Stephen is captivated by Maggie, purely from her looks, apparently, and for no discernible reason at all, Maggie falls in love with him!

This makes no sense in the novel. All of the earlier feminist themes of Maggie’s strong-will, moral strength and stifled intelligence are abandoned. Philip Wakem appears again, still holding a candle for Maggie. Philip is also friends with Stephen and Lucy. The novel now becomes a romance with Maggie torn between her old love, Philip, who she can’t marry because of Tom clinging to the enmity between the two families, and her new love, Stephen, who she can’t marry, or even pursue, because it would betray her cousin. That she doesn’t simply refuse Stephen’s advances are entirely out of character. That she doesn’t simply ignore Tom’s unreasonable injunction against Philip and marry him anyway, or put off Phillip decisively and look elsewhere is also unaccountable.

Lucy, thinking that Maggie’s happiness lies in healing Tom’s feud against the Wakems, endeavors to help Tom in his plan to re-take ownership of the mill by getting Philip Wakem to persuade his father to let it go, which Philip does (it had been failing anyway under the new manager). But the real problem is that Stephen is determined that Maggie should marry him. The climax comes when Stephen takes Maggie rowing on the river and, without consulting her, maneuvers to arrange for her to elope with him. She refuses. But when the town finds out that the two of them have gone off together and Maggie is prevented from returning for a few days, Maggie’s reputation is ruined. She returns to St. Ogg to a kind of Scarlet Letter situation where the town believes the worst of her and refuses to have any society with her. Tom, who has moved back into the mill with his mother, refuses to allow Maggie to associate with them. She moves to the rented room at Bob Jakim’s house. Philip forgives her, by letter. Lucy does, too, eventually. Stephen stays out of town but, by letter again, re-extends his impossible proposal of marriage.

We’re almost at the end of the novel now and it seems Eliot, unable to resolve the conflicts she’s created decides to simply wipe them away. The deus ex machina comes in the form of a torrential rain which swells the Floss and floods the town. Maggie takes one of Bob Jakim’s boats and rows off to the mill. She finds Tom and rescues him. Mrs. Tulliver had been away when the rain started and is safe. Tom and Maggie row back to town with a plan to aid Lucy, but wreckage from further up the river sweeps over them. Their boat is capsized. They drown. Everyone else lives. The end.

I hadn’t much enjoyed the first half of the novel anyway. Children’s dramas and school days, aren’t very interesting reading for me. The novel reminded me of Great Expectations, which I also didn’t like. (You notice there’s no Dickens on my Reading List.) I was irritated with young Tom’s mistreatment of his sister and her unwarranted devotion to him. The drama of the family financial ruin prepared me for a resolution where the adult Maggie is able to use her smarts to save them, and her moral goodness to resolve the family feud and marry the deserving Philip Wakem. But that didn’t come. Instead, from out of the blue, Stephen Guest appears and Maggie gets entangled in a romance/tragedy that I refused to believe and that Eliot refuses to resolve.

Read Middlemarch instead.

I read A. S. Byatt’s introduction to The Mill on the Floss included in the edition I borrowed from the library at the beginning of May. I saved starting the novel itself until Jim and I took off May ninth for a three week vacation to Venice, London, and Berlin. I read much of the novel on the long plane ride to Venice, then put it down while we enjoyed our holiday. I nearly finished it on the long plane ride home from Berlin, but read the latest twenty pages this morning. Now that I’ve written this up I’ll return the book to the library where it’s overdue having first checked it out back in March.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see other titles on my reading list, click here.