The Mill on the Floss in Never too Late to Read Classics

Jul 13, 2018 Laurene rated it really liked it

The Mill on the Floss was the first novel I have ever read of George Eliot. My world was surrounded by Tom, Maggie, Phillip, Lucy and Stephen. I enjoyed The Mill on the Floss tremendously!

"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, - if it were no the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass - the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows - the same redbrea ...more

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Apr 02, 2022 Laura (Reading is a Doing Word) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022-read, books-i-own, classics-trad-and-modern

I love Eliot! I discovered Middlemarch last year and was captivated by Dorothea and her fellow Middlemarch inhabitants, so I had high hopes going into this one.
I read along with fellow #MillOnTheMarch -ers and it was an absolute delight!

Mill on the Floss is a more narrowly focussed novel than Middlemarch. It hones in on the Tulliver family and particularly Maggie and her relationships with various family members.
Maggie is often likened to a semi biographical version of Eliot herself. I know ther I love Eliot! I discovered Middlemarch last year and was captivated by Dorothea and her fellow Middlemarch inhabitants, so I had high hopes going into this one.
I read along with fellow #MillOnTheMarch -ers and it was an absolute delight!

Mill on the Floss is a more narrowly focussed novel than Middlemarch. It hones in on the Tulliver family and particularly Maggie and her relationships with various family members.
Maggie is often likened to a semi biographical version of Eliot herself. I know there are some parallels but I would have to read more about Eliot herself to sufficiently comment.

Maggie is the star of this show! She is smart, passionate, impetuous, loyal and loving; qualities which are not always rewarded or reciprocated. She struggles to fit into the societal expectations of what’s appropriate for a young girl/woman and is judged unfairly by many including her own family.

She adores her brother Tom and it is their relationship which bookends the novel and which underpins a lot of the action. This book puts familial relationships under the microscope - we see varying sibling relationships such as those of Maggie and Tom, Mr Tulliver and Aunt Gritty and Mrs Tulliver with her Dodson sisters. There is a wide variety of fondness, criticism, sympathy and love shown between these different siblings. Parental love is also shown in different guises. Maggie’s parents have quite different feelings towards her and Tom. Mr Waken and Philip have an interesting dynamic and the various Dodson Aunts towards their own children.
I enjoyed this dissection of close family ties. Sometimes those closest to us can be the cruellest, yet they can also surprise us. I loved that the behaviour of these characters was not predictable - they were flawed, imperfect and inconsistent humans, as we are in reality.

As well as familial love there were also examples of romantic love - some more fervid than others.
Maggie and Philip’s relationship was one I struggled with slightly, although perhaps very indicative of the times and the opportunities for marriage open to women of that era, I sometimes felt uncomfortable about the “dutiful” feel to it. When other romantic opportunities arise Magis is then bound by a different sort of duty.

Another aspect of this novel that grew on me was the portrayal of the eponymous Mill. The Mill mirrored the fortunes of the family, their heritage, their hardships and their future and their fate. The acknowledgment of emotional attachment to a place was something I appreciated- the complex nature of feeling tied to somewhere, committed to it, yet perhaps not fully free because of those very ties. The concept of “home” and what that means is bound up in the Mill and the behaviour of those belonging to it.

There’s so much more I could write about this book - the moral inconsistencies of society, in judging women at that time were vividly highlighted. Eliot draws a profound portrait, not only of an “unconventional” young girl growing to be a woman, but also of the wider expectations and restrictions of society.

I loved Maggie (perhaps not quite as much as Dorothea - Middlemarch still has my heart) and she’ll stay with me for quite some time to come.
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Feb 13, 2020 Christine PNW rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics-club-round-2

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Jul 03, 2012 GONZA rated it really liked it

Ok il libro è bello, la Eliot è una garanzia non c'è dubbio ma quanto può essere triste! Maggie poteva avere, non dico tutto, ma parecchio e invece il destino si accanisce su di lei, sulla sua famiglia, sui suoi rapporti di qualsiasi genere, fino a quando muore, che a questo punto è quasi una liberazione, peccato che annega quando poteva dare una svolta positiva alla sua vita, anche se credo non l'avrebbe comunque fatto.
Mi resterà in mente parecchio questa storia, intanto perchè la volevo legge ...more

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