The Mill on the Floss

The subtractive test is passed in most of the book and failed in its proportions. Remove the aunts and the book loses the Dodson law that Tom inherits and that judges Maggie in the end; remove Stelling’s Latin and the novel loses its argument that education misfits both children; remove Bob Jakin and Maggie has no witness from below. The suit against Pivart, the ruin, the curse in the Bible and the horsewhipping of Wakem are each required by the vengeance Tom carries. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the reverse of padding: the childhood is given room and the adult crisis is not, and the flood settles in one short book what the novel argued could not be settled. A part is missing more than a part is idle, and the end is decreed rather than compelled.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The book brings into the open a condition English fiction had not stated with this exactness: a gifted girl’s mind in a provincial world with no use for it, seen from inside and from childhood. Maggie is quick where Tom is slow, and Tom is the one sent to school. The essay that opens Book Fourth sets the ruined castles of the Rhine against the dull villages of the Rhône and says the narrowness of the Dodson and Tulliver world must be felt to understand the young who struggle out of it. The second disclosure is moral: the past and its ties are a real claim against present passion, not simply repression, and Maggie’s “If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?” is argued, not asserted. The third is the bond of sister and brother, love and judgment at once, never sentimentalised.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Elevation comes often and from different heights. The opening plain, where “the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea”, sets a large calm the book will turn to terror. Maggie cutting off her hair, pushing Lucy into the mud and running to the gypsies are comic and painful at once and rise above anecdote. Tulliver’s ruin, the curse he has written into the Bible, his last attack on Wakem and his death have a stark, almost Biblical height. Maggie reading Thomas à Kempis in the bare house is the first summit of inward life; the drift with Stephen, the waking on the Dutch vessel and the refusal is the second; the flood is the highest and the most contested. Held below the top because the aunts’ comedy is vivid without rising, and the frequency drops in the hurried last volume.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth here is built, not merely evoked, and the river is the structure. The legend of St Ogg, told in Book First, is load-bearing: the ferryman who carries a woman with a child across the flood finds she is the Virgin, and his boat is seen on the waters ever after when the river floods; at the end Maggie is the one who rows into the flood to save. The water suit with Pivart, the mill that lives by the river, the drift with Stephen and the flood make one figure of fate that rises from law-suit to judgment. Behind it stand brother and sister as a primal pair, the fall from the paradise of childhood, the Red Deeps and the lost mill, renunciation as the imitation of Christ, and the Biblical close. The cost: the flood as myth outruns the flood as event, and the archetype overrules the particular at the last.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The inheritance is the English novel of courtship and the domestic novel of manners, with the child-narrative of Dickens beside it. The turn is threefold. A child’s mind, and a girl’s, is taken with full adult seriousness for three books, rendered from within and not as charm or pathos. The provincial commercial world of millers, lawyers, carriers and a trading firm is treated as tragic matter, Eliot’s wager in Adam Bede pressed further. And the marriage plot is refused: the heroine is offered Philip, Stephen and, in its way, her brother’s approval, takes none of them, and the book ends in death. The stake was real, and the refusal of the expected end cost the book its name for proportion. Held exactly at the gate because the swerve is moral and structural more than formal.

Score: 8.5 / 10

In its first half the form is the instrument of the knowledge. The slow chronicle of childhood is the argument that the past binds: begun with the grown Maggie, her refusal of Stephen would read as scruple; because the reader has lived through the jam puffs, the rabbits, the hair, the gypsies and the ruin, the past has weight and the refusal is knowledge. The retrospective narrator, dreaming by the mill at the opening, makes the whole a memory and lets the essays stand as part of the form, and the river runs from the opening plain to the flood as form and as figure. What lowers the figure: the three-volume proportion was not mastered, and a providential flood answers a question the realist form had held open. A different ending would change what the book says, a sign of the form’s force and of its strain.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise, and the evidence is long. The book has been re-examined for more than a century and a half without settling its questions: whether the ending is earned or rescues the author from her own question, whether Stephen Guest is passion or a figure too thin to tempt, whether Maggie is a heroine of renunciation or a portrait of self-suppression the narrator shares, whether Tom is Dodson justice or its caricature. F. R. Leavis made it a test case in The Great Tradition (1948), and feminist criticism from the 1970s returned to it as a founding text of the woman’s novel of education and of the woman who cannot be placed. It yields in sentence and structure too, since the narrator’s essays repay the return as the plot does. Held below the top because its world is narrower than the widest web of Eliot’s later novel.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The field is the English novel of its century. The force: the book reorganised what English fiction could do with childhood and with provincial obscurity, putting a mind’s growth and its collision with family law at the centre and ending in tragedy rather than marriage. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hardy’s tragic novels of provincial life and constrained women, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, work in the same field of a self too large for its place, and Tess and Sue Bridehead are of Maggie’s kind; Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow carry on the novel of growing up inside a working family and a landscape; the female novel of education of the twentieth century takes Maggie as a starting point. Held below Eliot’s own principal reach, which is Middlemarch’s: this book is a strong second.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and fabric over 166 years. The form is whole: the text was published in Eliot’s lifetime and survives entire, with no question of version that alters the work. Presence is continuous: in print since 1860, widely taught in schools and universities in Britain and beyond, translated, and adapted for film and television. It falls short of the widest presence because it is read less than Middlemarch and less than the most read English novels of its century, Austen’s, Dickens’s and the Brontës’. Its surface, the corn trade, the law of water and the Dodson proprieties, is fixed to a moment, but the book has already outlived that moment, and its readers do not need the mill to be moved by the sister and the brother.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Command of the medium is high and uneven. The comic dialogue of the Dodson sisters is among the finest in English: each aunt has her idiom, her property and her grievance, Mrs Glegg her two kinds of front and her money, Mrs Pullet her bonnet and her medicines, with Uncle Pullet and his lozenges beside her, and the comedy is exact sociology. Tulliver’s puzzled speech is a voice given without condescension. The narrator’s essayistic prose joins argument to scene, as when Book Sixth takes up Novalis’s saying that character is destiny and qualifies it: not the whole of our destiny. Charged: the third volume is hurried, Stephen is drawn from outside, the drift chapters lean on summary at their crisis, and the flood is told at a speed the book has not used before.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Aunt Pullet’s bonnet and the flood that drowns brother and sister. For most of the book one law holds them: character and inheritance shape fate slowly, by the habits of a family and a town, and the Dodson comedy and the Tulliver tragedy are the same law seen at different distances. The river runs through both as a physical and a moral fact, a real coherence of wide range. The break is at the end. The book’s own law, stated with Novalis, is that destiny unfolds through character and circumstance; the flood is circumstance of another order, an act of nature that resolves by reconciliation what the moral law had left in deadlock. St Ogg, the river and the mill prepare it, so it is not a contradiction; it is a change of physics in the last chapters.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Many orders held in one structure and integrated, not listed. Consciousness: Maggie’s from nine to nineteen, Tom’s, Tulliver’s, Philip’s. The family: two lineages, Dodson and Tulliver, as rival moral systems. Labour and trade: the mill, Deane’s rise in Guest and Co, Tom’s work and his trading venture with Bob Jakin, the debts repaid. Law: the Pivart suit, the bankruptcy, Wakem’s purchase of the mill. The town: the opinion of St Ogg’s as a force that condemns Maggie after the drift. Education: Stelling’s Latin and Euclid misapplied. Religion: Thomas à Kempis, and Dr Kenn’s Christianity against the town’s. The natural order: the river, the seasons, the flood. History: the legend of St Ogg and the town’s past, lightly. Held below the top because the state, politics and the larger society, which the widest novels hold, are not attempted.

Score: 8.7 / 10