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    A Study Guide for George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss
    A Study Guide for George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss
    A Study Guide for George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss
    Ebook53 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 8, 2015
    ISBN9781535838405
    A Study Guide for George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss - Gale

      1

      The Mill on the Floss

      George Eliot

      1860

      Introduction

      The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860, is based partially on Eliot's own experiences with her family and her brother Isaac, who was three years older than Eliot. Eliot's father, like Mr. Tulliver in the novel, was a businessman who had married a woman from a higher social class, whose sisters were rich, ultra-respectable, and self-satisfied; these maternal aunts provided the character models for the aunts in the novel. Like Maggie, Eliot was disorderly and energetic and did not fit traditional models of feminine beauty or behavior, causing her family a great deal of consternation.

      By the time Eliot published The Mill on the Floss, she had gained considerable notoriety as an immoral woman because she was living with the writer George Henry Lewes, who was married, though separated from his wife. Social disapproval of her actions spilled over into commentary on the novel, and it was scathingly criticized because it did not present a clear drama of right and wrong. Perhaps the most offended reader was Eliot's brother Isaac, who was very close to her in childhood but who had become estranged from her when he found out about her life with Lewes; he communicated with her only through his lawyer. In the book, Eliot drew on her own experiences with a once-beloved but rigid and controlling brother to depict the relationship between Maggie and her brother Tom.

      Author Biography

      George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, born November 22, 1819, at South Farm, Arbury, Warwickshire, England. She was the youngest child of Robert Evans and his second wife, Christiana Pearson, and had four siblings, two by her father's first marriage and two by his second. Eliot was her father's favorite child and was brought up to follow his Protestant beliefs. However, in her early twenties, she told her father that although she admired Jesus and his teachings, she rejected the idea that the Bible was of divine origin, and she refused to go to church. This shocked her family and many others, but she refused to attend services she did not believe in. This emphasis on following her own inner promptings rather than social convention would become a marked feature of her character and her life.

      After her father's death in 1849, she had little money and little chance of getting married because she did not fit the contemporary ideal of beauty. A meeting with John Chapman, a family friend, led her to write for the quarterly Westminster Review. Through this work, she met the writer George Henry Lewes in 1851. Lewes was married with five children, though separated from his wife, and he and Eliot fell in love and began openly living together, a scandalous act for the times. As a result, Eliot was ostracized by many respectable people for most of her life.

      In September 1856, Eliot began to write fiction. Her first work, a story titled Amos Barton, was published anonymously in the January 1857 issue of Blackwood's Magazine. More stories followed, and her first novel, Adam Bede, was published in 1859. It received immediate critical acclaim as a work of genius in the periodical The Athenaeum and was called the highest art by the writer Leo Tolstoy.

      Eliot followed this with the semi-autobiographical The Mill on the Floss (1860), which was highly successful, earning her four thousand pounds in one year, a huge sum for the time. In the next ten years, she published Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), and Felix Holt the Radical (1866). From 1871 to 1872, she published her masterpiece, Middlemarch. This was followed by Daniel Deronda (1876) and Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879).

      Lewes died in 1879, leaving Eliot grief-stricken. In 1880,

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