‘The Mill on the Floss’

Keith Love’s closing column for this feature having been a confession of his long failure to recognize the merits of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” it is only fitting that I should introduce myself by admitting that at age 13 I summarily wrote off the works of George Eliot in disgust on the ground that in “Adam Bede” she had suddenly produced a pregnant Hetty Sorrell without, as I felt in my all-knowing ignorance, having given the reader the slightest warning of the poor girl’s condition. Thus I was astonished in the course of my required reading in college to discover a totally different and vastly improved George Eliot, a mistress of comic irony and wit, a caustic critic of established religion, an acute sensibility responsive to the emotional and physical needs of individuals chafing against the stultifying restraints of “correct” and “moral” society.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was brought up in Warwickshire in a constrictingly conventional religious atmosphere. In the opening chapters of “The Mill on the Floss,” she makes good use of the local dialect in creating Mr. Tulliver, the obstinate owner of Dorlcote Mill, who has deliberately chosen to marry a woman he considers his intellectual inferior so that she will be an obedient wife and mother.

He naturally favors his son Tom over his unpredictable and impulsive daughter Maggie. Tom will, he hopes, rise in the social world if given a sufficient education. Tom may even become the equal of his father’s particular enemy, Wakem, who has bested Tulliver in the matter of a dam controlling the flow of water in the Ripple, a small tributary to the river Floss.

As it happens, Tom’s loving sister Maggie, intense and sensitive, is intellectually and emotionally her prosaic brother’s superior. Nevertheless, her feeling for him remains central in her life, and she feels abandoned when Tom is sent off to live in the household of Mr. Stelling, a clergyman who takes a few resident students for tutorials.

The essence of the novel lies in the relationship of brother and sister, with Tom growing more and more distant and bound by convention, while Maggie senses a different world without any real opportunity to enter it except through her imagination.

“In writing the history of unfashionable families,” Eliot observes, “one is apt to fall into a tone of emphasis, which is very far from being the tone of good society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely moderate kind but are always presupposed, no subjects being eligible but such as can be touched with a light and graceful irony. But then, good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner engagements six weeks deep, its opera and its faery ball-rooms; rides off its ennui on thoroughbred horses, lounges at the club, has to keep clear of crinoline vortices, gets its science done by Faraday, and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses: How should it have time or need for belief and emphasis?”

Listening to such a passage superbly read by Eileen Atkins, an English actress, on a Cover to Cover Cassette, may prove a hazard to even the most accomplished freeway driver, but the risk is well worth taking. And throughout the 9 hours and 20 minutes of this brilliantly modulated reading of Eliot’s prose, even an enthusiast thoroughly familiar with the novel will hear freshly sensitive nuances set against the broader comedy of Mrs. Tulliver’s two sisters, “the redoubtable Mrs. Clegg and the melancholic Mrs. Pullett.”

Many 19th-Century novels were deliberately written for family entertainment, suitable for evening reading to a group made up of children and adults, and thus communicating on more than one level. But “The Mill on the Floss,” with its criticism of prevailing mores, was not one of these. Given the unsympathetic world in which Maggie lived--and she eventually is “compromised” in the terms of that world--her life is destined to end in some measure of tragedy. In today’s world, this might not be true, but as for Tom, he is ever with us. I leave it to the individual listener to fill in the blank.

Though the senior Tullivers were not modeled on the Evans family, the relationship between Maggie and Tom was intensified in Eliot’s own life by the fact that she had broken with convention in 1854, at age 35, and joined George Henry Lewes, a versatile writer, in a union outside of marriage that lasted until his death in 1878.

When she began writing “The Mill on the Floss,” following the enormous success of “Adam Bede” (despite its flaws in my 13-year-old eyes), she was 38 and had informed her brother, Isaac Evans, that she was living with Lewes. Isaac answered her through the family solicitor and forbade their ailing sister, Chrissey, to correspond with Mary Ann. In spite of this, Chrissey, dying of consumption, wrote to her sister in defiance of Isaac, saying she regretted the end of their correspondence.

Eliot herself lived in fear that her pseudonym might be discovered, for she realized that to have it known that the writer of books “praised for their lofty moral tone” was living out of wedlock might well be fatal to her career. Cut off as she was from all family affection, Eliot could recover her love for Isaac and their “old, old home” only through fiction, and Tom and Maggie’s tragic final union was clearly planned from the beginning and was not, as Henry James speculated, “a tardy expedient for the solution of Maggie’s difficulties.”

If, like me, you read George Eliot before you could understand her, or rebelled against the high school assignment of “Silas Marner,” here is your chance to listen to a voice from the past that speaks clearly to the present.

WHERE TO ORDER TAPES:

Cover to Cover Cassettes; International call: 0264 89 227; P.O. Box 112; Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 3UG, England.