The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss is a novel by the English writer George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It was first published in three volumes on 4 April 1860 by William Blackwood and Sons.

The book follows the Tulliver family over ten to fifteen years, beginning in the late 1820s. The mill stands at the meeting of the River Floss and the smaller Ripple, and Tom and Maggie Tulliver grow up in it. Maggie is quick, emotional and starved of the approval she wants from her brother, who is steadier and is educated away from home to take on the family's affairs. When their father loses the mill through a lawsuit, the family's position and the children's prospects both change, and the rest of the novel follows the consequences: the debts, the expectations placed on Tom, and Maggie's attempts to find a life that suits her in a society that has very little room for a woman as intelligent as she is. The plot turns on a family vendetta and on the choices Maggie makes under pressure from people who value her reputation above her happiness.

Eliot sets the story before the Reform Act of 1832, in a rural England of small trades and old grudges, and the novel is one of her most direct treatments of what a woman of ability was permitted to do.