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The Mill on the Floss

Name: The Mill on the Floss
Price: 13.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: George Eliot
ISBN: 9780141439624

Paperback $13.00

Published on Apr 29, 2003 | 704 Pages

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$13.00

Published on Apr 29, 2003 | 704 Pages

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Drawing on George Eliot’s own childhood experiences to craft an unforgettable story of first love, sibling rivalry and regret, The Mill on the Floss is edited with an introduction and notes by A.S. Byatt, author of Possession, in Penguin Classics. Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother; hunchbacked Tom Wakem, the son of her family’s worst enemy; and the charismatic but dangerous Stephen Guest. With its poignant portrayal of sibling relationships, The Mill on the Floss is considered George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel; it is also one of her most powerful and moving. In this edition, writer and critic A.S. Byatt, author of Possession, provides full explanatory notes and an introduction relating The Mill on the Floss to George Eliot’s own life and times. Mary Ann Evans (1819-80) began her literary career as a translator, and later editor, of the Westminster Review. In 1857, she published Scenes of Clerical Life, the first of eight novels she would publish under the name of ‘George Eliot’, including The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. If you enjoyed The Mill on the Floss, you might like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, also available in Penguin Classics.

Author

George Eliot

MARY ANN EVANS was born on November 22, 1819, at Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England. After her father’s death she settled in London and from 1851 to 1854 she served as a writer and editor of the Westminster Review, the organ of the Radical party. In London she met she met George Henry Lewes, a journalist and advanced thinker. Lewes was separated from his wife, who had had two sons by another man, but had been unable to obtain a divorce. In a step daring for Victorian times, Mary Ann Evans began living openly with Lewes in 1854, in a union they both considered as sacred as a legal marriage and one that lasted until his death in 1878. With Lewes’s encouragement, Mary Ann Evans wrote her first fictional work, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857; it was followed by two more stories published under the pseudonym George Elliot—“George” because it was Lewes’s name and “Eliot” because, she said, it was “a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” At the age of thirty-nine she used her memories of Warwickshire to write her first long novel, Adam Bede (1859), a book that established her as the foremost woman novelist in her day. Then came The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). Her masterpiece and one of the greatest English novels, Middlemarch, was published in 1871–72. Her last work was Daniel Deronda (1876). Before her death in 1880, she had been recognized by her contemporaries as the greatest living writer of English fiction.

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The Mill on the Floss

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