On Abby’s suggestion, I have now listened to The Mill on the Floss, a 527-page book written in 1860 by the author of Middlemarch. It is a nice long walk through the lives of a brother and sister set in the Midlands of England in the 1820s or 1830s. The mill on the river Floss is owned and run by the father of the siblings who is such a hothead that he loses the mill and all the household goods in a long-running lawsuit. The son Tom is a smart and quick in matters not related to Latin or other intellectual pursuits; his sister Maggie is sensitive and intellectual, but tends to be impractical.
When the family is impoverished, Tom steps in and is hard-working and clever at regaining their fortune. Maggie meanwhile has fallen in with the son of the lawyer who was her father’s enemy. Later she falls in love with the boyfriend of her much loved cousin and SPOILER ALERT, like heroines of operas, “She dies, she always dies.” All this description is to say, for me the plot was not the joy. I loved the pace, the evocation of a time and place, the clever and funny little bits.
Here are some of the bits I particularly enjoyed:
In describing the man who was to take on Tom’s education the author says, “He thought religion was a very excellent thing and Aristotle a great authority…he believed in all these things as a Swiss hotel keeper believes in the beauty of the scenery around him and in the pleasure it gives to artistic visitors and in the same way Mr. Stelling believed in his method of education.”
The author tells that the religious views of Mrs. Tulliver’s family (the Dodsons) was a simple, semi-pagan kind, not doctrinal; they were unaware of having any choice in their views. The only other religion they knew of was that of chapel-goers, “which appeared to run in families like asthma.” “Chapel” in Victorian England refers to non-Anglican religious services and could be Presbyterian, Methodist, or other sects and is related to class.
In a consideration of the concept “Character is destiny,” the author says that is so, but it is not the whole of our destiny. “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia and having gotten through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies and some moody sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.”
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880). She lived with a married man, George Henry Lewes, who had an open marriage with his wife. Despite this scandal, her work was loved by Queen Victoria.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, first published in 1860, I listened to the audiobook. Available in the public library.