The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot is great, though really. The Floss, in case you’re curious, is a river. Not a real one, but knowing this does make the title make some kind of sense. The Tulliver family live in the mill. Someone upstream built a dam for irrigation purposes, and Mr. Tulliver, against all advice, threw all of his money into a legal dispute, which he obviously lost, costing him everything, including the mill. The lawyer who represented his opponent was a Mr. Wakem. This is relevant later.
Our main protagonist, though, is his daughter Maggie. She’s a small child at the beginning, playing with her older brother Tom. I’m led to believe that a lot of the novel is thinly veiled autobiography, so Maggie is much smarter than Tom, reads a lot, is good at languages, grows up to be beautiful and chafes against her lot as a woman. Tom gets sent to study under some clergyman and basically does badly and Latin and Greek for a while, but his study companion is one Philip Wakem, son of that guy from the first paragraph and also a hunchback. It’s never clear quite how bad this is, but it’s enough that everyone comments on it and calls him deformed. Tom is inclined to hate him because his dad has cursed the Waken name over the lawsuit. Despite this, Maggie comes to visit and she and Philip get on very well, both being nerds. This is relevant later. Mr. Tulliver has some kind of mental breakdown and Tom decides to dig everyone out of the hole. He gets into business, makes money in trading, and eventually has enough to pay off all his father’s debts (three hundred pounds!). Mr. Tulliver has a very satisfying meeting with all his creditors, pays them off and then sees Wakem on his way home, jumps off his horse, runs over and beats the shit out of him with a whip, and then proceeds to go home and die. Quite an exit.
Pause to mention Mrs. Tulliver and her three sisters. Previously Dodsons, they had money growing up and don’t really affect the plot much beyond popping up for flavour and to criticise everyone and worry about what people will think. To be fair to Aunt Glegg, she does offer to put Maggie up after the Shaming.
Maggie has a cousin, Lucy, who is basically a perfect shining angel without fault. She, Lucy, is somewhat informally engaged to this guy Stephen Guest, who’s rich and fancy. Maggie, now I think 19, meets him finally and they both fall catastrophically in love with each other. Philip, meanwhile, has been in love with Maggie since they met in school and she’s been mildly receptive. He presumes he has very little chance (hunchback, you know) and while Maggie is not opposed for this reason, Tom has told her that she has to choose between the two of them. The final third of the book is basically everyone stewing over this dilemma. Philip is over-analysing looks between Stephen and Maggie, she is having a series of moral crises, Stephen is totally melting down and Lucy is glowingly oblivious. You feel it all under your skin.
It all comes to a head when Maggie and Stephen are supposed to row up the river to meet Lucy but he doesn’t stop, he keeps going on and on and when Maggie realises, he begs her to elope, to flee to Scotland and come back married and damn the torpedoes. She squirms and refuses and eventually they get onto a passenger boat which takes them to more of a hub they can get home from. Stephen doesn’t come home, he fecks off to the Netherlands and writes a letter back explaining what happened. Philip also disappears, presuming he has been terminally rejected, and also writes a letter forgiving Maggie. The two do not appear again.
Maggie, however, goes home to a firestorm of gossip. Tom refuses to let her back into the mill, she can’t get a “situation”, ie a job, to be independent, takes up as a nanny for the local clergyman until everyone assumes they’ve been shacking up and he has to tell her to leave. She’s determined to fight through it and then Lucy turns up at the room she’s been renting. Lucy, being the flawless angel I mentioned above, obviously forgives her. I should have realised at this point that all relationship arcs are basically finished: Mr. Tulliver is dead, Stephen is rejected, Philip has rejected himself, Lucy is reconciled. The only thing left is Tom.
So we get to the end, and I guess spoilers for a 150 year old book, but the town of St. Ogg’s is hit by a gigantic flood, overflowing the Floss and filling up everyone’s houses. Maggie gets into a boat that has conveniently floated her way - they did mention several times her learning to row, like girls usually don’t, so good job foreshadowing - and she takes off towards the mill. Her mother is out of town but she does rescue Tom, who finally decides she’s worthy of respect and they reconcile. Then they immediately get slammed with some jetsam, the boat gets crushed and they drown together. This happens on the second last page of the book. I was kind of stunned at how abrupt it was.