George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

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General Materials

• Discussion Questions

Social, Political, and Cultural Contexts

• Literary relations
• Eliza Lynn Linton on the novel

Theme and Technique

• Theme and Subject
• Gloomy fatalism of a Greek tragedy
• The pysche as engine in The Mill on the Floss
• Maggie Tulliver and Girls' Education in The Mill on the Floss
• Setting and Description
  • resemblance to landscapes of Constable and Wordsworth
• Characterization
  • Three Stages in the Development of Characterization in George Eliot's Fiction
• Plot and Narrative Structure
• The Mill on the Floss and George Eliot's knowledge of Bankruptcy
• Symbol, Image, and Motif (material needed)
• Genre and Style
  • Autobiographical elements in the bovel
  • Autobiography and Autobiographicality
  • Realism in Fiction

Bibliography

Ashton, Rosemary. "Lunch with the Rector: George Eliot and Mark Pattison Revisited." The Times Literary Supplement. 31 January 2014: 14-15.

Byatt, A. S. Introduction. The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot. London: Penguin, 1979. 7-40.

Cross, John, ed. George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Vol. I. New York: Harper 1885.

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Ed. A. S. Byatt. London: Penguin, 1979.

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. [now the standard scholarly text]

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Ed. Carol T. Christ. New York: W. W. Norton, c. 1994. [handy student edition with background information and criticism]

Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon Haight. Vol.3. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954.

England's Daughters: What is Their Real Work? (London, 1870): 9.

Ermarth, Elizabeth. "Maggie Tulliver's Long Suicide." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 14.4 Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1974): 587-601.

Fleishman, Avrom. George Eliot's Intellectual Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Fourth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners for England and Wales (London, 1938): 298.

Golden, Catherine J. Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003. See especially Golden's excellent chapter 3, "Prophetic Reading," on Maggie Tulliver.

Haight, Gordon. George Eliot: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Hughes, Kathryn. George Eliot: The Last Victorian. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001.

Ketabgian, Tamara. The Lives of Machines: The Indistrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature & Culture. Michigan, 2011. xi + 236 pp. [Review by Herbert Sussman]

King, Jeannette. Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory an Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. London: The Women's Press, 1978.

Sadoff, Dainne F. Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot and Brontë on Fatherhood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982.

Yeoh, Paul. "'Saints' Everlasting Rest': The Martyrdom of Maggie Tulliver." Studies in the Novel. Vol. 41, No. 1 (spring 2009): 1-21.

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Last modified 28 January 2015