The Mill on the Floss Summary: Maggie Tulliver, Her Brother, and the River
What it is about
George Eliot published The Mill on the Floss in three volumes on 4 April 1860 with William Blackwood and Sons. An American edition followed the same year from Harper & Brothers in New York. George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, and the book carries a good deal of her own life inside it, including the social disgrace she faced during her long relationship with George Henry Lewes, a married man.
The novel follows Tom and Maggie Tulliver across roughly ten to fifteen years, beginning when Maggie is nine. They grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss, where it meets the smaller River Ripple, near the village of St Ogg's in Lincolnshire. The rivers and the village are invented. The period is not. Historical details place the opening around 1829, after the Napoleonic Wars and before the Reform Act of 1832. In one chapter Mr Tulliver and Mr Deane discuss the Duke of Wellington and his conduct on the Catholic question, a conversation only possible after 1828.
The story turns on family rather than adventure. Mr Tulliver's bitter quarrel with the lawyer Wakem leads to bankruptcy and the loss of the mill, and eventually to his death. Tom leaves school and goes into business to pay off his father's debts, and in time earns back the family's position. Maggie, clever and hungry for books and experience, is left at home with nothing to use her mind on. For a while she renounces the world altogether, after reading Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ. The rest of the novel tests that renunciation against two men and one impossible loyalty.
The main characters
Maggie Tulliver is the centre of the book. She is idealistic, emotional and intellectually restless, and much of what she does is shaped by a longing to recover the unconditional love her father gave her when she was small. Tom is her older brother, practical, reserved and unbending. Their bond is close and difficult at once, and the family crises both widen the gap between them and prove how much they care.
Philip Wakem is the son of the man the Tullivers blame for their ruin. He has a hunched back, and he is sensitive and well read. Maggie's feeling for him begins in pity for people who have been broken or overlooked, but he also gives her access to the cultured, thinking life she craves. They meet secretly in the woods, against the wishes of her father and brother, and Philip draws a pledge of love from her. When Tom finds out, he makes her give Philip up.
Lucy Deane is Maggie's cousin, kind and comfortable, living the leisured life Maggie does not have. Stephen Guest is a lively young man of standing in St Ogg's and Lucy's assumed fiancé. When Lucy invites Maggie to stay, Maggie and Stephen are drawn to each other against their own better judgement, and Philip, who is friends with both of them, finds his love for Maggie revived.
The themes
Duty against desire runs through everything. Maggie's obligations to Philip and Lucy were formed when she was poor and isolated and dependent on them for whatever good her life held. What she wants pulls the other way. Eliot does not make either side simple.
Then there is family as inheritance and as cage. The Tulliver and Dodson relatives judge, lend, withhold and comment, and Tom's idea of honour is built out of their values. Class matters too. The loss of the mill drops the family socially, and Maggie's restricted education is a condition of her sex as much as her circumstances. The novel is also a coming of age story about a gifted girl whose gifts have nowhere to go.
How it ends
Stop here if you want to come to it fresh. On a rowing trip down the Floss arranged by Lucy, Stephen unwittingly takes the place of a sick Philip. The two drift further than they meant to. Stephen proposes they board a passing boat to Mudport and marry, and Maggie, worn out, does not argue. On the way she struggles between her feeling for Stephen and her obligations to Philip and Lucy. At Mudport she refuses him and returns to St Ogg's, where she is treated as an outcast. Stephen leaves for Holland. Tom turns her from his door and says she will never be welcome under his roof again. Lucy forgives her face to face, Philip in a letter. Then the river floods, and Maggie takes a boat through the water to reach Tom at the old mill, and the two set out together.
Why it still matters
It remains one of the most personal of the Victorian novels, written by an author who knew what public disapproval felt like and who refused to let her heroine off lightly or condemn her outright. Readers come for Maggie, who is one of the great awkward, intelligent, unsatisfied figures in English fiction, and for a portrait of provincial family life that is affectionate and unsparing at the same time. The mill, the two rivers and the flood give the book its shape, and the image of water carrying people where they did not intend to go holds the whole story together.
