In the Library
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot, 1860
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 7
- Length
- Length 206k words
£1.99
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the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
Maggie Tulliver cuts off her hair with the kitchen shears as a girl, furious that no one will let her be as clever and as loved as she knows herself to be, and the shears might as well be the whole book's argument in miniature: she is already larger than the small town meant to shrink her. George Eliot follows that mutinous, book-devouring child into a woman starved of any room to be herself, hemmed in by a brother's rigid love, a father's ruinous pride, and a town, St Ogg's, that forgives men their weaknesses and never once forgives a woman hers. The tenderness between Maggie and Tom is the novel's deepest wound: he needs her completely and punishes her, again and again, for wanting more than he can give. And past every window the Floss keeps rising, patient, indifferent, the river this whole family was built beside and has never been able to leave. Few novels understand so exactly what it costs a brilliant woman to be loved only on someone else's terms.