The Mill on the Floss

On the river Floss, near the old town of St. Ogg’s, the Tulliver family lives and works at Dorlcote Mill — until a ruinous lawsuit throws them into poverty and disgrace. At the heart of their story stand two children: Tom, steady, proud, and bent on restoring the family name; and Maggie, dark, clever, and emotionally famished, forever reaching for more love and learning and beauty than her world will grant a girl.

Cleverer than the brother who is schooled while she is not, Maggie grows into a woman whose largeness of heart has nowhere to go. Her tender, forbidden friendship with the crippled Philip Wakem — son of her father’s enemy — and her later, more dangerous drift toward Stephen Guest, half-promised to her own cousin, test her conscience to its limit. Through it all runs her deepest need: the good opinion of the brother whose approval she can never quite secure.

First published in 1860, The Mill on the Floss is the most autobiographical of George Eliot’s novels — a searching study of thwarted intellect and divided duty, lit by the broad comedy of the Dodson aunts and shadowed throughout by the river that finally rises to claim everything. Its debated flood ending, in which brother and sister are reconciled and drowned in a single embrace, has moved and divided readers ever since.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.