The ending left me with emotional scarring…

As far as my overall thoughts go:

* Eliot has done an excellent representation of how a troubled woman becomes ruined by a world that was never constructed for her to thrive in the first place, she is blamed for her lack of agency and for the advantages men take against her.
* I’m not sure Maggie truly loved either Phillip nor Stephen. What I mean is that she seems to have loved Phillip in a platonic, child-like way. She merely felt passion for Stephen, an infatuation. Maggie’s love and loyalty for her brother meant she could never share that unconditional love and loyalty with either of these men. 
* Phillip and Stephen both projected their feelings onto Maggie, they would not have organically occurred without them showing Maggie the approval and attention her family never afforded her in childhood. 
* Aunt Glegg offering her hospitality in the end to the outcast woman that was Maggie demonstrated further the bonds of family, which are stronger than anything else.  Aunt Glegg was such a severe character throughout the novel and yet she showed her redeemable qualities when they were most important.  Bob Jakin was kind too. 
* The slow build of events was tiresome to me, however it was worth it in the end. I definitely prefer the pacing of the second half of the book but perhaps our attachments to Maggie and Tom could not have formed without the slow build.
* The heart-wrenching scene at the end, the life snuffed out like a candle light, on the raging waters of the Floss where they were raised, serves as a reminder that family feuds are trivial, be what they may. 
* I am disappointed Phillip and Maggie could not be together, Phillip was a sweetheart, endlessly adoring and forgiving of Maggie, the only one who really SAW a crippled man like him. He risked so much to confront his father like a tell man, unlike the rash boyish immaturity displayed by Stephen in his design to elope. 
* My final thought I will leave here is: I wonder if Eliot wrote this so that her brother would read it? I know the events are quite autobiographical and I also know that unfortunately the brother reached out to her not long before her death :((

This is such a beautifully evocative novel, centered around a deeply sympathetic protagonist in Maggie Tulliver, and the tragedy of its ending is only outranked by the shallow derision with which editor A. S. Byatt treats her development. From childhood, she is deeply sensitive and wants very much to be and do good, and her best attempts as a little kid to fight against both the totally developmentally appropriate forgetfulness and emotional explosiveness and the predetermined conclusion of her "wickedness" by every relative with regular access to her besides her father come entirely from her limited understanding of the world because she isn't being given the care and guidance necessary to understand herself, her circumstances, or the world in which she must live. Through lack of adequate modeling and constant unkindness from her own family (even her father's forgiveness and doting doesn't protect her from or come near preventing her brother's, her aunts', her mother's early mistreatment), she grows up a genuinely good person who gets treated like a monster by her own brother for the grievous sin of making a single friend, and then when she tries to let herself be happy after years of deliberate deprivation to atone for upsetting her brother, she gets repeatedly groped and harassed by her favorite cousin's would-be fiancé who then deliberately kidnaps her to force her to marry him, tries to manipulate her into marrying him despite her repeated reiterations of her non-consent, and then just fucks off to avoid the fallout both of publicly "ruining" a girl who has no context for the consequences of his actions on her life and of abandoning his presumed fiancée. Maggie dies trying to save her brother, who at that point had completely rejected her and wouldn't even listen to her side of the story (as he has done their entire lives for literally no reason except liking to have power over a child who had no other companion but him), in deliberate parallel of a local legend about the Virgin Mary and all she gets for her troubles is a shared grave and visits from both the childhood friend she would've married if she had the choice and the predator who manipulated both her and her favorite cousin. And it works! All Maggie has ever wanted was to be loved and to be good enough, especially in her brother's eyes, and he forgives her because she saves him from a flood and then grabs onto her to try and save them both from debris following them downstream and they're buried together as family. She gets what she wanted most in the most horrible, painful, limiting way possible, and it works. This book is insane. Maggie Tulliver did nothing wrong and I will die on that hill.

As a teenager, I made a list of 101 things to do in 1001 days. One of the things on my list was to read every book by one author. I thought it would be cool to know I’d read every novel in someone’s canon. I certainly didn’t manage it in 1001 days. In fact, I still haven’t managed it (unless you count authors who’ve only written one book), but a few years after making the list, I did make an effort to read every book by George Eliot — purely on the strength that I’d quite liked Adam Bede. I got halfway through Romola before giving up, but that means I did finish The Mill on The Floss once before.

I didn’t remember much about the story, except a vague sense of the tragic ending. (It’s only February and this is the second tragedy I’ve read this year!) Each time I read Adam Bede, I find it’s easier than I expect it to be, but The Mill on the Floss was the opposite — I found it harder going than I expected. Perhaps that’s because there’s a bit more philosophy and religious teachings that I’m not entirely familiar with. As with Adam Bede, I got impatient with all the digressions, especially around the middle of the novel. 

The characters are very different from those in Adam Bede — the setting is somewhat less rural, or perhaps it’s set slightly later and so society has progressed. Nonetheless, I really liked most of the characters who are intended to be sympathetic: Maggie, Tom, Lucy, Phillip, Bob. The characters who aren’t supposed to be sympathetic, namely ‘the aunts’, were well-drawn, too. The only character I really didn’t care about was Stephen Guest, which was something of a problem for the final act. 

Stephen and Maggie’s relationship just seemed so… shallow. They hardly ever had a proper conversation, they barely knew anything about each other and, as a reader, I hardly knew anything about Stephen. Maybe George Eliot intended it that way, to show how young people can be carried away by the first flood of emotion that is based on little more than physical attraction. The relationship suffered in comparison to Maggie’s friendship with Phillip, who she could have actual conversations with. In the pivotal scene between Stephen and Maggie they both 'feel too deeply to speak’, which I just didn’t find satisfying. 

Maggie’s inner struggle is definitely compelling; she wants to be a better person, and she tries so hard, but she’s flawed and has moments of weakness, just like a real person. It’s such a shame that her story has to end in tragedy. Despite having read The Mill on the Floss before, the conclusion took me by surprise. It’s fairly sudden and quite brief, but George Eliot did manage to wrap up all the loose ends quite nicely beforehand. I felt the most sorry for Tom, who hadn’t really experienced much in comparison to his sister and his friends.

Despite Maggie’s strong characterisation, I didn’t enjoy this as much as I enjoyed Adam Bede. The dialect is easier, but the philosophy and diversions are more distracting.