Review: The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Because I needed my 19th century fix. And also my first George Eliot!

Okay, I get the impression that this probably isn't her best work (need to get around to Middlemarch someday), but as an introduction to Eliot specifically, it's not a bad place to start with given how apparently autobiographical it is. Knowing how much the story mirrors Eliot's own experiences, it kind of amazes me how much insight she was able to pull out of the misfortunes she experienced, as well as the limitations of her own position in society as a woman, which this book is very quick to comment on.

In some respects it feels like a natural progression from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre; where Jane was independent in mind but more or less conformed to the social structures of her day, Eliot's Maggie Tulliver definitely does a lot more to poke at the walls surrounding her to the chagrin of just about everyone else in her life. It got really frustrating to see how easy it was for others to attribute these incursions to flaws in Maggie's own character (where they wouldn't be considered flaws by today's standards).

But it's all the more interesting seeing how Eliot deals with this treatment later on, especially when you think about how most people today would probably react to personal injustices. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised towards the end of this book at how certain situations and characters played out. The sibling-dynamic between Maggie and her brother Tom in particular is a highlight here, something that I really resonated with thinking about the relationships in my own extended family, but I can't say much more than that.

To be honest the writing can be a little overly long (so long that I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into at first but just kept reading onwards for the hell of it), and the narrator's sometimes moralistic commentary can be a bit much. And then there were times where I had to reread whole paragraphs-to-pages because Eliot's sentence structure suddenly got complicated and I couldn't tell what exactly she was trying to say, although that is more typical of works from this time period. But then there are moments scattered throughout where the prose moves into something a bit more profound and moving, or even familiar, and then you realize, this woman gets it.

Or should I just quote my thoughts 5 min after the ending: "what the hell did I just read. what. what. what."