George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss

The Mill has sat on my bookshelves for at least five years. Glaring at me. Every so often, my hand has hovered over it. Sometimes I’ve even taken it off the shelf. And then, I’ve always thought, no. A George Eliot mood is hard to come by. She’s so….earnest. Anyway, Teresa and Emily both said it was their favourite Eliot – and they are among my favourite bloggers, so I listen. Sometimes I am very obedient, and eager to please. (Much like an Eliot heroine).

In a nutshell, this is one of those ‘growing up and falling in love’ 19th century family dramas. Who should Maggie love best? Sensible and deserving but boring Philip? Hot stuff but flakey-rakey and undeserving Stephen? Or deeply judgemental and DEEPLY undeserving I-AM-RIGHT and YOU-MAGGIE-ARE-WRONG but still, underneath it all my heart is kind of in the right place and I am your brother after all, Tom? It’s set in a very insular, very gossipy, don’t step out of line, village. And it’s surely one of the greatest books about childhood ever written.

Maggie is a brilliant heroine. ‘Her life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded of herself that her part should be played with intensity’ – aren’t we all a bit like that, when we are teenagers? And though regular readers might know that I am not a fan of thinking the author is exactly the same as the main character, this is famously the story of Eliot’s own childhood relationship with her brother. You can see very clearly both Eliot’s love, and her hatred of his narrow-minded rigidity. He didn’t speak to her for over 20 years, because she had brought ‘shame’ on the family. So this is Eliot’s way of imagining a fictional alternative to her own story. If you are interested in the original, I highly recommend Kathryn Hughes’ George Eliot.

Sometimes I thought, I won’t be able to keep reading. It’s the same feeling I have about Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Poor Tess! That bastard Hardy won’t stop persecuting her. Likewise, here, Maggie goes fifteen rounds with fate, and gets sucker punched every single time. But I couldn’t let her go through it all alone.

WELL. There’s 650 pages so there is a lot I could say. What is Eliot saying about ‘know your place’ vs ‘try for something better?’ What is she saying about the nature of society? These could all be posts in themselves.

But what I most want to say is perhaps the bleedin’ obvious. George Eliot is so RIGHT-ON 19th century sister! ‘You are a man, Tom and have power, and can do something in the world’ Maggie says, and all crappy Tom says is ‘if you can do nothing, submit to those that can’. Maggie is clever and thoughtful but has to educate herself; Tom has money thrown away on his education for no better reason than that he is a boy. He has that terrible trait of patronising condescension. ‘You might have sense enough to see that a brother, who goes out into the world and mixes with me, necessarily knows better what is right and respectable for his sister than she can know herself’, he says, helpfully. Just stand there a minute, Tom, while I smack you in the face. And yet. Tom is real, because he’s complicated. He sacrifices all his own hopes and dreams for his family. It’s just that, in doing so, he loses what little compassion he has.

Also, less bleedin’ obviously for me, Eliot is FUNNY. Mrs Tulliver’s trio of harpy sisters are like three Mrs Bennetts rolled into one, but with extra special relish. Their constant refrain is: let me tell you why you are wrong – for your own good, of course. They got a bit grating after a while, but the worst of them, Mrs Glegg, unexpectedly turns out to be a little bit of a heroine herself. Eliot is so clever in her writing here. It would be easy to make these women one-dimensional, or to be patronising towards them. Or to be overly liberal and say, well, they can’t help themselves. But Eliot does neither.

Do not be fooled by my mournful expression. I like a giggle.

I must stop now as I am practically writing a 19th century epic myself.

I last read Eliot ten years ago, during my ill-fated Summer of Self-Improvement which consisted of reading Important Books just so that I could tick them off a list. And then thinking, well, I’ve read Middlemarch, so I probably don’t need to read any other Eliot. And now, even though half of me knows better, the other half of me thinks, ok done Middlemarch AND Mill on the Floss – definitely don’t need to read any others. I mean….Romola? Really? But is that right or am I being ridiculous?