Paige's review
The Mill on the Floss (Penguin Classics)
by George Eliot
Paige's review
The Mill on the Floss (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot
Paige's review
rating:
It is true that George Eliot understands human nature. One of the pleasures of this book was the canny characterization of even small characters. This is why I was puzzled by the fact that I found it impossible to get close to the main character, the heroine, Maggie. As a child she is impossibly messy and impetuous and clever - which as a reader I take to mean that she will be a spellbindingly fascinating woman when she grows up that I will (of course!) identify closely with, as would any woman able to make it through the extremely boring first three chapters by sheer force of Will. I expected the narrative to move farther into Maggie’s inner life as she gets older, but it doesn’t, and it left me kind of cold. My other beef with the book is the ending. It is just so…like Thomas Hardy. I think that it’s fitting that she took a male pen name – in some ways, I feel like she writes more like a man than a woman.
