The Mill on the Floss The Secret Life of Books

See how the tide is carrying us out,

away from all those unnatural bonds

that we've been trying to make fast around us and trying in vain.

It will carry us on, never pause a moment

till we are bound to each other so that only death can part us.

There are moments in a life when everything changes.

For Maggie Tulliver, the young heroine of this book,

The Mill On The Floss, one such moment occurs

when she elopes on a boat with a man she's hopelessly attracted to.

Once back on dry land, Maggie's life will never be the same again.

I first read The Mill On The Floss in my early 20s.

From the opening pages,

I was swept away in this classic coming-of-age tale.

The heroine is caught up in confusing moral crosscurrents

and ultimately ends up a fallen woman.

At the time of its writing,

the book's author was also a social outcast,

shunned by Victorian society for her scandalous relationship

with a married man.

Partly because of this,

the writer, Mary Ann Evans, chose to publish

under a male pseudonym, George Eliot.

The Mill On The Floss was her most autobiographical novel,

but it's also a kind of anti-biography.

The kind of life that Maggie Tulliver leads is one that Eliot herself might

have led had she not left her provincial home to become a London writer.

For me, this book is Eliot's masterpiece, a complex, funny,

all too human story of conflicting emotions,

of childhood and early adulthood, and its thwarted desires.

And 155 years after publication,

the book still has the capacity to shock, especially with

the tragic denouement, which,

whenever I read it, I am reduced to tears.

"And this is Dorlcote Mill.

"I must stand a minute or two here on the bridge and look at it.

"The unresting wheel, sending out its diamond jets of water.

"That little girl is watching it, too.

"She has been standing on just the same spot

"at the edge of the water, ever since I paused on the bridge.

"It is time the little play fellow went in, I think."

The book's main character, Maggie Tulliver,

is just a little girl when the story begins.

She lives in the local mill,

next to the River Floss with her mother, father and older brother Tom,

on the edge of the fictional town of St Ogg's.

Maggie has a head of wild black hair,

dark skin and dark eyes to match.

She's rebellious, impulsive and fiercely intelligent.

Indeed, her father says about her that she is "too cute for a woman

"but an overcute woman's no better nor a longtailed sheep,

"she'll fetch none the bigger price for that."

Here, Eliot, with her usual wit, is satirising the limited social role

of young women in the 1820s Britain.

A different future awaits Maggie's brother.

Tom, by virtue of his privilege of being a boy,

is destined to play a greater role in society

and so his father sets great store by his future.

"I shall give him an education and set him up

"to a business as he might make a nest for himself,"

he declares proudly,

before sending him off to a private school at great personal expense.

Although Tom is not the brightest compared to his sister, needless

to say, Maggie doesn't receive the same educational opportunities.

Her schooling ends at the age of 13.

But the life of the author herself followed a very different path.

Eliot was born here on the Arbury estate

in rural Warwickshire on 22nd November 1819.

She was christened Mary Ann Evans.

Her father was the estate manager but, unlike Mr Tulliver,

he was determined that his daughter receive a proper education.

From the age of five, Evans attended a number of local boarding schools.

However, her formal education ended at 16 when her mother died

and she became her father's housekeeper.

Undeterred, the independent-minded Mary Ann

continued to read voraciously.

She would come here to Arbury Hall,

the grand house belonging to her father's employers.

Inside this library,

she would eagerly devour books on subjects as various as philosophy,

religion, natural sciences, the arts, novels -

she particularly liked Sir Walter Scott.

The young Mary Ann Evans was so insatiable for knowledge that

later she taught herself Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish,

Hebrew, and she would read books in these various languages.

Evans would give her young heroine a similar hunger for learning.

For Maggie Tulliver, books have an almost totemic power to transport

and thrill.

And for Evans, her love of literature was inextricably bound up

with her desire to escape a life of domestic tedium.

In 1851, after the death of her father, she made the bold step

of moving to the capital, with its vibrant literary scene.

And it's in London, at the British Library, where the

only surviving manuscript of the Mill on the Floss is held.

And there is her handwriting, which is unbelievable that one can see it.

As you can see, it's incredibly neat

and it's now in bound volumes,

but at the time that Eliot was writing it, these pages would

have just been loose sheets, it's been bound up since.

The advantage of that was she could rewrite sections,

discard the original pages, bits moved around, bits crossed out,

you really do get a sense

of her working on it, perhaps struggling in places

to try and bring it together in a way she was happy with it.

I can see a correction there, which is exciting, cos you feel somebody thinking.

That's right. There are a few examples in these chapters.

Goodness, she has cut a bit there.

That's right. This section she seems to have cut out altogether.

This is part of a scene where the young Tom and Maggie are out to play,

they have a bit of an argument and in this section,

she sits there, having a little reverie,

thinking about how life would be so much better

if her brother Tom was to love her even more than she loved him.

Possibly Eliot decided this was too much detail

for this section, so she cut it out.

Evans took enormous care crafting the central relationship

of the novel, that between Maggie and her brother Tom.

"I love Tom so dearly, better than anybody else in the world.

"When he grows up, I shall keep his house

"and we shall always live together.

"I can tell him everything he doesn't know."

Their intense relationship is fractured

when Maggie forms a close bond with Philip Wakem.

Philip's father is a lawyer, closely involved in a legal dispute

that has led to Mr Tulliver's bankruptcy and the loss of his mill.

As a result, Maggie's family forbid her from having anything to do

with the son of their arch enemy.

But she decides to defy them and secretly meets Philip.

These are the Red Deeps - a forest near Evans' own birthplace.

And it's here that she played out Maggie's growing friendship

with Philip.

Like Maggie, young Philip was a gentle and sensitive soul,

who craved her affection.

And on their secret walks together,

they would discuss art and literature and the troubles of their young lives

and Philip eventually declares his love for Maggie.

And she doesn't quite reciprocate

because she's always aware of the feud between the two families.

So though she is fond of Philip, she doesn't quite commit to him.

When Tom finds out about these meetings,

he is furious with his sister.

"You are a disobedient,

"deceitful daughter who throws away her own respectability

"by clandestine meetings with the son of a man

"who has helped to ruin her father."

Tom forces Maggie to meet Philip one last time,

to tell him their friendship can no longer continue.

A disappointed and angry Philip responds.

"It is not right, Maggie.

"I would give up a great deal for my father,

"but I would not give up an attachment or a friendship

"of any sort in obedience to any wish of his

"that I did not recognise as right."

"I could not have my own will," responds a crestfallen Maggie.

"Our life is determined for us."

The idea of forbidden relationships is central to the novel.

But parallels to the story can be found in the author's own life.

Within a few years of moving to London,

Evans had fallen in love with a man called George Henry Lewes.

Both emotionally and intellectually, it was a great meeting of minds.

They fell in love during the spring of 1853 and, shortly afterwards,

they moved in together.

There was just one small problem.

Lewes was already married.

Victorian society took an extremely dim view of their relationship.

But Evans was defiant.

She had finally found the physical and emotional affection

she had long craved.

Evans was socially shunned

as a result of her relationship with Lewes.

But for her, it was a price worth paying.

Although Lewes couldn't, or wouldn't, divorce his wife,

he and Mary Ann behaved like a married couple.

She always referred to him as her husband

and believed she had found not just a partner, but a soul mate.

He came from quite a rackety background.

Very urban, unlike her rural background.

He's the illegitimate son of a poet,

grandson of a musical comedian.

He's entirely self-taught

and he has that kind of extraordinary freshness of mind,

because he's very, very good on science, he's fascinated by

the new kind of knowledge that's coming out of geology, archaeology.

I mean, he's the kind of Renaissance Man! He's immensely attractive.

But it was a scandalous relationship?

Well, what was scandalous about it was not the fact that a man

and woman are having sex and they're not married to each other,

it's that they refused to hide the fact,

and it's that that makes it scandalous.

Later, when she took the name George Eliot, why did she do that?

She knew that, if she published a novel under her own name,

everybody would be looking to see

-whether it came from a sort of tainted source, you know.

-Yeah.

How does she handle problems with sex and so forth?

So she wanted a nom de plume,

something to kind of stand between her and what she imagined

would be the sort of jabbering tongues and the pointed fingers.

And to choose a man's name also

-seems to kind of make it more impersonal.

-Yeah.

She's not going to be judged as a woman, or as a scandalous woman.

But Victorian society did judge Eliot as a scandalous woman.

And it would never accept such an irregular relationship.

And neither would her family, especially her older brother Isaac.

In a letter she wrote to him in 1857, she finally revealed the secret

she had been keeping for the past four years.

"I have find someone to take care of me in the world.

"My husband has been known to me for several years

"and I am well acquainted with his mind and character."

Isaac Evans was furious

and his curt reply came two weeks later via his solicitors.

He could never accept her so-called marriage

and he ordered the rest of the family never to speak to her again.

Her social isolation was now complete.

Mary Ann's sister Chrissey stopped writing

and Isaac remained silent for the next 23 years.

She was devastated by his rejection.

But she mined this bitter experience

to inform the story of The Mill On The Floss.

" 'Well,' said Tom with cold scorn,

" 'if your feelings are so much better than mine,

" 'let me see you show them

" 'in some other way than by conduct that's likely to disgrace us all!

" 'I have a different way of showing my affection!'

" 'Because you are a man, Tom,

" 'and have power and can do something in the world.' "

George Eliot, a woman who had assumed a man's name,

was determined to do something in the world.

And that something was to write.

She had a clear idea of her purpose as a novelist,

but had little regard for the kind of fiction

that most female writers were producing at the time.

In her 1856 essay, entitled Silly Novels By Lady Novelists,

Eliot railed against the predominant form of women's fiction,

which dealt mainly with the love lives of the upper classes.

She found these stories frothy, pious and pedantic.

The Mill On The Floss would be none of these things.

Eliot wrote much of the novel in this house in Wimbledon, South London,

where she and Lewes moved in March 1859.

But it was not a happy time for her here emotionally.

Only three days after moving in, she received a distressing letter

from her sister Chrissey, telling her that she was dying of consumption.

Forbidden by her brother to meet her sister,

even in these desperate circumstances, she was devastated.

Chrissey died on the 15th of March.

Eliot immediately stopped working on the book and wrote to a friend.

"I have been crying myself almost into a stupor

"over visions of sorrow."

After spending just over a year writing The Mill On The Floss,

it was finally published in three volumes in the spring of 1860.

It was an instant success.

In just a few weeks, it sold over 5,000 copies.

However, despite the healthy sales, not all the reviews were positive.

The Guardian found the last section problematic

and at odds with the rest of the book and, it's true,

it's something which has continued to puzzle many readers to this day.

The critic wrote, "There is a clear dislocation in the story

"between Maggie's girlhood and her great temptation."

Maggie's great temptation comes in the character

of 25-year-old Stephen Guest, the dashing young son

of one of St Ogg's richest merchant families.

Although Maggie is strongly attracted to Guest,

once again, this is a forbidden relationship.

He is already engaged to Maggie's cousin Lucy,

but this doesn't deter him

from declaring his passionate feelings for Maggie.

" 'I am mad with love for you!"

" 'If you do love me dearest,' he said,

" 'it is better, it is right that we should marry each other.' "

Maggie is torn between loyalty to Lucy, her family

and her intense desires.

" 'Oh, it is difficult!

" 'Life is very difficult!

" 'Many things are dark to me.

" 'But I see one thing quite clearly, that I must not,

" 'cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others.'

" 'Love is natural!

" 'But surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too!'

" 'Our love would be poisoned!' "

Stephen Guest tries one last time to lure Maggie into his arms.

Having drifted out to sea on an ill-fated boat trip,

they find themselves having to spend the night out on deck.

Although they don't sleep together, it looks like an elopement

and their relationship is no longer secret.

Now, in this instant, Maggie's life had changed utterly.

She's doomed.

Despite having never consummated her relationship with Guest,

she was now a social pariah.

It's little wonder that Maggie's great temptation

has left many critics and readers confused.

Her motives seem irrational and opaque, even to herself.

" 'I would rather have died than fall into this temptation.

" 'It would've been better if we had parted forever then.

" 'But we must part now.'

"Her heart beat like the heart of a frightened bird.

" 'Remember what we both felt weeks ago?

" 'That we owed ourselves to others?' "

She goes on to say...

" 'The wrong remains the same.' "

This was new territory for English fiction.

Eliot, a female writer, was exploring the bewildering

and often self-destructive forces of human sexuality.

And in exploring these ideas,

she was heavily influenced by a German author she much admired -

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The novel that particularly inspired George Eliot

when she was writing Mill On The Floss,

of course, is his novel from 1809,

Die Wahlverwandtschaften - Elective Affinities.

Goethe uses the chemical idea that certain elements will be

naturally attracted to others and will combine

to form new elements and so, of course,

it's a kind of sexual story, really.

So do you feel that influenced her ability to write about Maggie,

who's attempting to be virtuous but, in fact,

-falls in love with Stephen Guest?

-Yes.

-Which is a sort of... an elective affinity.

-It is, it is.

She entitles a chapter Illustrating The Laws Of Attraction,

so she quite clearly has got Goethe in mind there.

Um, and also, they float down the river together and the big episode

-in the Wahlverwandtschaften also takes place in a boat.

-Ah.

So she took a lot of the plot from Goethe?

She did take quite a lot of the plot from Goethe, but she also took

a kind of open-handed, open-minded view of sexual relations.

She admired Goethe's lack of moralising...

-Hmm.

-..and his love of generosity, as a writer,

towards what she calls mixed and erring humanity,

er, people who make mistakes and yet can be forgiven.

And she gets as near, I think, to any writer in the 19th century

in England to being open about sexual attraction,

and that's what she is in this novel.

In her own life, Eliot knew all too well

the consequences of chemical attraction and sexual desires.

Her relationship with George Henry Lewes came at a high price.

Being estranged from her brother was always her greatest regret.

And this was a theme that she would return to

in the book's cataclysmic ending.

At just 19 years of age, Maggie was already a fallen woman.

With no-one else to turn to, and in complete desperation,

she heads back to the old mill

and she begs her brother Tom for sanctuary.

But he rejects her.

" 'You will find no home with me!

" 'You've disgraced my father's name! You've been base, deceitful!

" 'No motives are strong enough to restrain you!

" 'I wash my hands of you for ever!

" 'You don't belong to me!' "

For over two decades, George Eliot had no contact with her brother.

And it was during this time that

she became the most successful novelist of her generation,

gaining immense wealth and eventually social acceptance.

Even Queen Victoria was a fan.

But in 1878, her soul mate, George Henry Lewes, died.

THUNDER RUMBLES

Eliot was distraught and went into a period of mourning.

Her brother Isaac still remained silent.

Eliot's long-wished-for resolution of this painful rift

would be something that only played out in the pages of her fiction.

At the end of the book, Maggie is caught up in a violent storm.

The waters of the Floss rise dangerously

and the river that once powered the mill now threatens to sweep it away.

Maggie desperately tries to seek out her family.

She arrives at the flooded Dorlcote Mill in a small rowing boat

and Tom scrambles in beside her.

Brother and sister are finally reunited,

but the flood waters are rising around them.

"Tom, looking before him, saw death rushing on them.

" 'It is coming, Maggie,' he said in a deep, hoarse voice,

"loosing the oars and clasping her."

'Eliot's emotional investment in the story's ending

'can be seen in the handwritten pages of her manuscript.'

You can see how the writing changed.

-It really is quite different from the first volumes.

-Hmm.

Yes, it... it does look more emotional.

-You could see it's more slanted.

-That's right.

The very last few pages and you can really see that.

-Oh, yes! My gosh!

-This is the very last section.

I mean, I did read that she suffered a lot at the end of the book.

She found it very hard to write, because, of course, she was

writing her invented resolution of her love for her brother,

which, in real life, was not being played out

-in the same way at all.

-Absolutely.

Maggie and Tom are almost about to go down in the boat.

"Clinging together in fatal fellowship." Oh, gosh!

And much bigger spacing between each line and, I mean,

one of her servants did say that she was red-eyed in the morning whilst

she was writing this, but certainly, you can see great passion in it.

"The next instant, the boat was not seen on the water.

"Brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted,

"living through again in one supreme moment

"the days when they had clasped their little hands in love

"and roamed the daisyed fields together.

"In their death, they were not divided."

It's a deeply moving ending.

This brother and sister, who have so often been at loggerheads,

are finally reunited, but only in death.

You get the feeling it's a sort of wish fulfilment on Eliot's part.

She had achieved so much that her heroine Maggie Tulliver could not -

intellectual fulfilment and romantic love -

but on the other side,

there was one part of her life that remained an open wound.

Eliot's inability to befriend her brother during her life

was a private sorrow that she was able to mine

and weave into, er, a piece of art.

Two years after Lewes' death, Eliot did find love again.

This time, she married legally, in the spring of 1880.

And nine days after the wedding, she received an unexpected letter.

"My dear sister, I have much pleasure in availing myself of the present

"opportunity to break the long silence which has existed between us

"by offering sincere congratulations.

"Your affectionate brother, Isaac Evans."

This short note seemed to bring to an end

half a lifetime of separation between brother and sister.

But sadly, it was not to be.

George Eliot died in December that year

without ever seeing her brother again.

We will never know

if her brother Isaac ever read The Mill On The Floss.

But if he did, he would've had to recognise that his sister had

produced a masterpiece of moral complexity and sadness.

What Eliot had created was a powerful account of female self-realisation

and the barriers that so often prevented it.

For me, the book's heroine is

one of English fiction's most engaging creations.

Maggie is one of the great heroines

precisely because she's not perfect, and none of us are.

"No wonder, when there is this contrast

"between the outward and the inward, that painful collisions come of it.

"A girl of no startling appearance

"or anything else that the world takes wide note of

"may still hold forces within her as the living plant seed does,

"which will make a way from themselves,

"often in a shattering, violent manner."

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