Key themes
- Intelligence in a woman — and the world that cannot accommodate it
- Childhood as a lost paradise that can never be recovered
- The flood as fate, accident and symbol
About this book
From the author of MIDDLEMARCH and SILAS MARNER, a story of frustrated intelligence and longing, featuring the intelligent Maggie, who yearns to be loved, and her brother Tom, who is forced to study.
Published in 1860, The Mill on the Floss is the most autobiographical of Eliot's novels. The Tulliver family's world is closely based on her own Warwickshire childhood.
Discussion questions
- Maggie Tulliver is too intelligent and feeling for the world around her, yet she keeps returning to it. What is Eliot saying about the relationship between a woman's gifts and her social constraints?
- Tom and Maggie Tulliver are deeply bound and deeply incompatible. How does Eliot trace their relationship — and what does the ending ask us to feel about it?
- The St. Ogg's community is provincial, limiting and often cruel to Maggie. Yet Eliot doesn't simply condemn it. What is she saying about the relationship between individuals and their communities?
- The ending — the flood — has divided critics for 160 years. Is it earned, arbitrary, or a formal solution to a psychological problem the novel cannot resolve through character alone?
- George Eliot published under a male pen name. Does knowing this change how you read a novel so centrally concerned with what it means to be a woman of intelligence in a provincial world?
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