The Mill on the Floss: Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot

Rebellious and affectionate, Maggie Tulliver is always in trouble. Recalling her own experiences as a girl, George Eliot describes Maggie's turbulent childhood with a sympathetic engagement that makes the early chapters of The Mill on the Floss among the most immediately attractive she ever wrote. As Maggie approaches adulthood, her spirited temperament brings her into conflict with her family, her community, and her much-loved brother Tom. Still more painfully, she finds her own nature divided between the claims of moral responsibility and her passionate hunger for self-fulfillment. George Eliot's searching exploration of Maggie's complex dilemma has made this one of the most enduringly popular of her works.

This classic novel, first published in 1860, tells the story of Maggie Tulliver. Intelligent and headstrong but trapped by the conventions of family tradition and rural life, Maggie is one of the great heroines of Victorian literature. Along with Maggie’s story, the novel also tells a companion tale of the social pressures that restrict the vision of her beloved brother Tom. George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss remains one of her most popular and influential works.
This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and extensive contextualizing notes as well as a broad range of appendices drawn from contemporary documents dealing with issues such as 19th-century views of disability, education, and the Woman Question.

“This edition of George Eliot’s most passionate novel about a woman’s life is accompanied by a selection of contemporary materials that demonstrate the surprisingly radical context of the author’s views at this point in her career. Oliver Lovesey has selected brief, eminently readable portions from Eliot’s own translations, essays, and reviews that will educate the reader in the ‘real’ George Eliot—a woman of amazing education herself, and of profoundly original thought that transcended the conventions of her time. The edition also includes the full text of the author’s poem, ‘Brother and Sister,’ a parallel narrative of Eliot’s childhood that is crucial to the reader’s understanding of the novel, as well as other very useful selections from historical documents and contemporary reviews of the novel.” — Mary Wilson Carpenter, Queen’s University
“This edition is a splendid presentation of George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel. The long and generous introduction dispels some of the myths about the author’s life, traces subtle relations between the novel and the moral complexities Eliot faced in Victorian society, places the novel in the context of her life’s work, and offers valuable analyses of the novel’s style and structure. Footnotes throughout the text helpfully explain dialect words, obsolete expressions and literary allusions. Excerpts from George Eliot’s critical writings, added as appendices, give insight into some of the ideas about fiction, religion, and the place of women in society that entered into the writing of The Mill on the Floss.” — Jacob Korg, Professor Emeritus, University of Washington

A. S. Byatt was born in 1936 and educated in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge, of which she is now an Honorary Fellow. She taught English at University College, London, from 1972 to 183. She appears regularly on radio and television, and writes academic articles and literary journalism both in England and abroad. Her fiction includes The Shadow of the Sun; The Game; The Virgin in the Garden; Still Life; Sugar and Other Stories; Possession, winner of the 1990 Booker Prize and the 1990 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction prize; the novella Angels and Insects; The Matisse Stories; The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, a collection of fairy stories; Babel Tower; Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice; The Biographers Tale; A Whistling Woman and The Little Black Book of Stories. Her work has been translated into 28 languages. Her critical work includes Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Unruly Times (on Wordsworth and Coleridge) and, with the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré, Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers. Passions of the Mind, a collection of critical essays, appeared in 1991; a new collection, On Histories and Stories, appeared in 2000; Portraits in Fiction, a study of the relationship between painting and the novel, and (ed.) Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, by George Eliot, in 2001. She was appointed DBE in 1999.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
George Eliot: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
The Mill on the Floss
Appendix A: George Eliot’s Translations, Essays, Reviews, and Poems

1. From George Eliot’s translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854)
2. [George Eliot], “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” Leader (13 October 1855)
3. From [George Eliot], review of Thomas Keightley’s Life, Opinions, and Writings of John Milton, The Westminster Review (October 1855)
4. [George Eliot], “The Antigone and Its Moral,” Leader (29 March 1856)
5. From [George Eliot], “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” The Westminster Review (October 1856)
6. From George Eliot, “Notes on ‘The Spanish Gypsy’ and Tragedy in General” (1868)
7. George Eliot, “Brother and Sister,” The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874)

Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews of The Mill on the Floss

1. Spectator (7 April 1860)
2. [E.S. Dallas], The Times (19 May 1860)
3. [Dinah Mulock], Macmillan’s Magazine (April 1861)
4. From Henry James, The Atlantic Monthly (October 1866)

Appendix C: Historical Documents: Mythic and Religious Contexts; Medicine and Education

1. From Mrs. Anna Jameson, “St. Christopher,” Sacred and Legendary Art, vol. 2 (1848)
2. From Daniel Defoe, “Of the Tools the Devil Works with,” The History of the Devil (1727)
3. From Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (1737)
4. From Auguste Comte, The Catechism of Positivism (1858)
5. From Samuel Hare, Cases and Observations Illustrative of the Beneficial Results (1857)
6. From [William Ballantyne Hodgson], “‘Classical’ Instruction: Its Use and Abuse,” The Westminster Review(October 1853)

Select Bibliography