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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Eighteen hours ago I had over 300 pages left to read. Six of those hours I slept. The other twelve I spent reading The Mill on the Floss. Voraciously.
George Eliot might be the best female writer, ever.
The Mill on the Floss follows the life of Maggie Tulliver, a rebellious and affectionate little girl who lives with her mother, father, and brother in Dorlcote Mill. Prone to the emotional outburst and feeling of the female sex and falling into and out of extremes, we watch as Maggie grows into adulthood. Maggie's high spirits and rash decisions bring her into conflict with her family, community, and what is most devastating to her, her brother.
At its core, The Mill on the Floss is story of Maggie and the four men who mark her life. Maggie, a forgetful and emotional child, wants nothing more than evidence and reciprocation of the unconditional love of her brother; she seeks it as a child and continues to as an adult. Tom, and his unrelenting severity, seems to weaken and diminish poor Maggie and one can't help but be pulled in the directions as she is. She struggles with morals, personal responsibility, obtaining her independence and her own self-fulfillment. At times seeming overly childish, Maggie is also more knowing than those around her; no doubt due to her ability to view things from different perspectives. The theme of the water in the book, weaving in and out of the story, flowing and ebbing as Maggie does, both building and destroying, has a majestic feel about it.
As I said, I had 300+ pages to go and couldn't stop reading. The last 200 or so pages are an edge-of-your-seat-thrill-ride read. I returned to the book and read it every chance I could get. I had no idea how it would end and I most desperately had to find out.
And the ending. Oh, the ending. I'll say it may not be what you expect. It may not be what you want. But it is admirable, nonetheless.
George Eliot might be the best female writer, ever.
The Mill on the Floss follows the life of Maggie Tulliver, a rebellious and affectionate little girl who lives with her mother, father, and brother in Dorlcote Mill. Prone to the emotional outburst and feeling of the female sex and falling into and out of extremes, we watch as Maggie grows into adulthood. Maggie's high spirits and rash decisions bring her into conflict with her family, community, and what is most devastating to her, her brother.
At its core, The Mill on the Floss is story of Maggie and the four men who mark her life. Maggie, a forgetful and emotional child, wants nothing more than evidence and reciprocation of the unconditional love of her brother; she seeks it as a child and continues to as an adult. Tom, and his unrelenting severity, seems to weaken and diminish poor Maggie and one can't help but be pulled in the directions as she is. She struggles with morals, personal responsibility, obtaining her independence and her own self-fulfillment. At times seeming overly childish, Maggie is also more knowing than those around her; no doubt due to her ability to view things from different perspectives. The theme of the water in the book, weaving in and out of the story, flowing and ebbing as Maggie does, both building and destroying, has a majestic feel about it.
As I said, I had 300+ pages to go and couldn't stop reading. The last 200 or so pages are an edge-of-your-seat-thrill-ride read. I returned to the book and read it every chance I could get. I had no idea how it would end and I most desperately had to find out.
And the ending. Oh, the ending. I'll say it may not be what you expect. It may not be what you want. But it is admirable, nonetheless.
4.5
Funny how the title of a book can put you off reading it, making it sound boring, especially to your younger self, and how that preconception can stick with you through the years. I felt that way about Cather’s [b:Death Comes for the Archbishop|545951|Death Comes for the Archbishop|Willa Cather|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1436632846s/545951.jpg|1457974] until I finally read some Cather and I felt that way about this title. A mill as a main ‘character’? And what in the world is a floss?
The mill is a driving force, yet Maggie is the main character and it’s easy to see the young girl as the portrait of a young Eliot. Her love of and pride in her reading is tolerated condescendingly in the community; an intelligent woman is not a good thing, as even her proud father makes plain to her. From early on, one senses the doom that hangs over Maggie, a female dissatisfied with the limits of provincial life, yearning for more, while fiercely loving her home and her family.
A passage about books and reading and a millworker not wanting to know anything of "fellow-creatures" in the wider world had me thinking about Eliot’s continuing relevance, though she is not mocking this man. Eliot is empathetic toward all her characters, telling (and it is telling, not showing, in that 19th-century-literature way) the reader more than once not to think too poorly of this or that character, even one I inwardly sighed over every time she appeared.
Though the ending is beautifully written, and I realize it's of its time period, I was disappointed with it, especially with whom Maggie’s fate is ultimately tied to, as I found the description out of that person’s character, though true to Maggie and to the novel’s theme.
I can’t speak to [b:Death Comes for the Archbishop|545951|Death Comes for the Archbishop|Willa Cather|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1436632846s/545951.jpg|1457974]—I still haven’t read it—but if I’d read 'The Mill on the Floss' as a young adult, I have a feeling it would’ve been as precious to me as Maggie’s few books were to her.
Funny how the title of a book can put you off reading it, making it sound boring, especially to your younger self, and how that preconception can stick with you through the years. I felt that way about Cather’s [b:Death Comes for the Archbishop|545951|Death Comes for the Archbishop|Willa Cather|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1436632846s/545951.jpg|1457974] until I finally read some Cather and I felt that way about this title. A mill as a main ‘character’? And what in the world is a floss?
The mill is a driving force, yet Maggie is the main character and it’s easy to see the young girl as the portrait of a young Eliot. Her love of and pride in her reading is tolerated condescendingly in the community; an intelligent woman is not a good thing, as even her proud father makes plain to her. From early on, one senses the doom that hangs over Maggie, a female dissatisfied with the limits of provincial life, yearning for more, while fiercely loving her home and her family.
A passage about books and reading and a millworker not wanting to know anything of "fellow-creatures" in the wider world had me thinking about Eliot’s continuing relevance, though she is not mocking this man. Eliot is empathetic toward all her characters, telling (and it is telling, not showing, in that 19th-century-literature way) the reader more than once not to think too poorly of this or that character, even one I inwardly sighed over every time she appeared.
Though the ending is beautifully written, and I realize it's of its time period, I was disappointed with it, especially with whom Maggie’s fate is ultimately tied to, as I found the description out of that person’s character, though true to Maggie and to the novel’s theme.
I can’t speak to [b:Death Comes for the Archbishop|545951|Death Comes for the Archbishop|Willa Cather|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1436632846s/545951.jpg|1457974]—I still haven’t read it—but if I’d read 'The Mill on the Floss' as a young adult, I have a feeling it would’ve been as precious to me as Maggie’s few books were to her.
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
There are characters in literature who are unforgettable.
Different readers will place different characters in the unforgettable category but I'd imagine there are a few characters who would turn up on the lists of a great many readers: Anna Karenina, for example, Heathcliff, perhaps, Don Quixote most definitely.
You've probably already thought of names to add to the list, world famous literary characters I've either forgotten about or never heard of, but no matter the exalted status of the characters who might figure on such a list, I'm now convinced that George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver could hold her own in the unforgettable stakes—which causes me to wonder what it is that makes a character unforgettable.
Already, looking at my own short list, I see some elements that these characters have in common: being different in their thinking and mode of living, and most strikingly, the tragic destiny they share in one way or another (though tragic Don Quixote is memorable for his comic side too—and he managed to die safely in his own bed, attended by his faithful Sancho Panza).
But back to Maggie Tulliver. Out of the many tragic literary characters I've read about, some of whom are also marked out by difference, why do I place her immediately in the exclusive 'unforgettable' group? And why, since she's such a powerful character, didn't Eliot name the book after her, as she did with Romola, Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda?
When I reached the end of the book, I understood Eliot's choice of title better. It's actually a very fine title: The Mill on the Floss. Not only is there a lilting music to it, it also embodies the essence of the story: the intense love Maggie felt throughout her life for her childhood home by the river. Indeed, there are some beautiful lines about the connections people feel to a 'place' in this book, the thoughts, for example, that Eliot gives Maggie's father, and which could well have been Maggie's thoughts too, at an older age:
He couldn't bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this, where he knew the sound of every gate door, and felt that the shape and color of every roof and weather-stain and broken hillock was good, because his growing senses had been fed on them.
Maggie's growing senses are central to the power she holds as a character, and they are the reason she is unforgettable. She lives almost as if she had no membrane to shield her nerve endings, she feels every moment of life with huge intensity—in great contrast to her extended family, the Gleggs and the Pullets, and their paltry preoccupations with nest eggs and feather mattresses.
We get an inkling of Maggie's unusual sensitivity at the very beginning of the book which opens with an unnamed narrator dozing in an armchair, dreamily recalling a child seen years before, a little dark-haired girl standing by the mill on the river Floss, staring intently into the water. Our attention is fixed firmly on dark-haired Maggie from that moment, and the narrator's meditation about the swollen river, which begins as a simple description of the water but segues into what could be the thoughts of the child contemplating it, traces the arc of the story in a few simple lines: The stream is brimful now, and lies high in this little withy plantation, and half drowns the grassy fringe of the croft in front of the house. As I look at the full stream, the vivid grass, the delicate bright-green powder softening the outline of the great trunks and branches that gleam from under the bare purple boughs I am in love with moistness, and envy the white ducks that are dipping their heads far into the water here among the withes, unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above .
(Incidentally, the narrator then disappears as a 'character', and we find ourselves in an omniscient narration. We never discover who the narrator is, this person who claimed to remember Maggie as a child, but we understand that it is the same narrator nevertheless who continues to tell us Maggie's story because twice in the course of the tale, the narrator gives a sign of his/her presence with an 'I' statement, quite like the mysterious way Henry James sometimes slips an 'I' statement into an omniscient narrative).
So, from the beginning, our attention is on dark-haired Maggie, the girl who will later say:
I'm determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness. If you could give me some story where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance. I want to avenge all the dark unhappy ones.."
The reader is completely behind Maggie in this desire to see the dark woman triumph. And dark-haired Maggie does triumph, the river playing an unexpected role in her victory. But the terrible irony is that Maggie cannot bear to triumph at the cost of the blond woman's happiness, and the mill and the river become her refuge in the end as they were in the beginning.
A perfect story with a perfect title.
Different readers will place different characters in the unforgettable category but I'd imagine there are a few characters who would turn up on the lists of a great many readers: Anna Karenina, for example, Heathcliff, perhaps, Don Quixote most definitely.
You've probably already thought of names to add to the list, world famous literary characters I've either forgotten about or never heard of, but no matter the exalted status of the characters who might figure on such a list, I'm now convinced that George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver could hold her own in the unforgettable stakes—which causes me to wonder what it is that makes a character unforgettable.
Already, looking at my own short list, I see some elements that these characters have in common: being different in their thinking and mode of living, and most strikingly, the tragic destiny they share in one way or another (though tragic Don Quixote is memorable for his comic side too—and he managed to die safely in his own bed, attended by his faithful Sancho Panza).
But back to Maggie Tulliver. Out of the many tragic literary characters I've read about, some of whom are also marked out by difference, why do I place her immediately in the exclusive 'unforgettable' group? And why, since she's such a powerful character, didn't Eliot name the book after her, as she did with Romola, Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda?
When I reached the end of the book, I understood Eliot's choice of title better. It's actually a very fine title: The Mill on the Floss. Not only is there a lilting music to it, it also embodies the essence of the story: the intense love Maggie felt throughout her life for her childhood home by the river. Indeed, there are some beautiful lines about the connections people feel to a 'place' in this book, the thoughts, for example, that Eliot gives Maggie's father, and which could well have been Maggie's thoughts too, at an older age:
He couldn't bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this, where he knew the sound of every gate door, and felt that the shape and color of every roof and weather-stain and broken hillock was good, because his growing senses had been fed on them.
Maggie's growing senses are central to the power she holds as a character, and they are the reason she is unforgettable. She lives almost as if she had no membrane to shield her nerve endings, she feels every moment of life with huge intensity—in great contrast to her extended family, the Gleggs and the Pullets, and their paltry preoccupations with nest eggs and feather mattresses.
We get an inkling of Maggie's unusual sensitivity at the very beginning of the book which opens with an unnamed narrator dozing in an armchair, dreamily recalling a child seen years before, a little dark-haired girl standing by the mill on the river Floss, staring intently into the water. Our attention is fixed firmly on dark-haired Maggie from that moment, and the narrator's meditation about the swollen river, which begins as a simple description of the water but segues into what could be the thoughts of the child contemplating it, traces the arc of the story in a few simple lines: The stream is brimful now, and lies high in this little withy plantation, and half drowns the grassy fringe of the croft in front of the house. As I look at the full stream, the vivid grass, the delicate bright-green powder softening the outline of the great trunks and branches that gleam from under the bare purple boughs I am in love with moistness, and envy the white ducks that are dipping their heads far into the water here among the withes, unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above .
(Incidentally, the narrator then disappears as a 'character', and we find ourselves in an omniscient narration. We never discover who the narrator is, this person who claimed to remember Maggie as a child, but we understand that it is the same narrator nevertheless who continues to tell us Maggie's story because twice in the course of the tale, the narrator gives a sign of his/her presence with an 'I' statement, quite like the mysterious way Henry James sometimes slips an 'I' statement into an omniscient narrative).
So, from the beginning, our attention is on dark-haired Maggie, the girl who will later say:
I'm determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness. If you could give me some story where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance. I want to avenge all the dark unhappy ones.."
The reader is completely behind Maggie in this desire to see the dark woman triumph. And dark-haired Maggie does triumph, the river playing an unexpected role in her victory. But the terrible irony is that Maggie cannot bear to triumph at the cost of the blond woman's happiness, and the mill and the river become her refuge in the end as they were in the beginning.
A perfect story with a perfect title.
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
The ending made my jaw fall lol. I liked it but sometimes it was way too overwhelming and not entertaining at all. We really got introspection into the characters (i appreciate it), but it was lacking action. However, it was a cute read. The sexism in the book’s society is crazy btw, but it’s how it worked back then, so it helps to see how we’ve thankfully progressed, although we have work to do yet.
i got concussed, what do you want from me lol (was reading for school)
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes