‘I desire no future that will break the ties of the past…’
As I enter into the third year of my English Literature degree, I will admit I am starting to flag. I gave up on Dicken’s Bleak House after it turned my own house into a bleak, meaningless shell. I blagged my way through Shakespeare’s As You Like It, mainly by reading the plot summary on Schmoop. I dearly miss reading for fun. The latest book in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series sits sad and unread on my bedside table. Even just reading something written in the last 100 years would be a lovely treat. Alas, instead I have to endure enjoy all 597 pages of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Published in 1860.
Author George Eliot is actually Mary Ann Evans, because female writers in Victorian England all had to have male alter egos, proving that they were all basically superheroes. The Mill on the Floss is perhaps her most famous work and it also very long, packed full of melodrama and also very, very long. I would add that The Mill on the Floss is quite a lengthy work. You get the idea.
The eponymous mill belongs to the luckless Tulliver family, cursed with a simpleton for a matriarch, a doomed father, a practical but emotionally cold son and a scandalous daughter who everyone keeps falling in love with. The novel spans two decades and focuses on Tom and Maggie Tulliver – the children of the family. The first half of the story takes in Tom’s education, the disgrace of his father and Tom’s first uneasy steps on the road to redemption. It is engaging, honest and refreshingly down to earth.
The second half of the novel however, focuses on the increasingly bizarre love triangle between Maggie Tulliver, wet blanket Phillip Wakem and rapey gentleman Stephen Guest, is not so enjoyable. Hundreds of pages of hushed declarations of love eventually result in Maggie and Phillip sharing a kiss and Maggie and Stephen holding hands and occasionally daring to look into each others eyes. It’s hardly Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Having said that, the ending is genuinely shocking, the destination almost making up for the ridiculously long journey. Almost.
And therein lies the rub. Eliot is a beautiful writer who successfully romanticises working class life but she gets too bogged down in endless romantic subplots to render The Mill on the Floss a true classic.
Anyway, it’s over now. And I never have to read it again. You can’t make me.