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    The Mill on the Floss
    The Mill on the Floss
    The Mill on the Floss
    Audiobook20 hours

    The Mill on the Floss

    Written by George Eliot

    Narrated by Laura Paton

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Maggie Tulliver has two lovers: Philip Wakem, son of her father’s enemy, and Stephen Guest, already promised to her cousin. But the love she wants most is the world is that of her brother, Tom. Maggie’s struggle against her passionate and sensual nature leads her to a deeper understanding and to eventual tragedy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateOct 1, 2012
    ISBN9781843796053
    Author

    George Eliot

    George Eliot (1819-80) was born Mary Ann Evans into the family of a Warwickshire land agent and did not escape provincial life until she was 30. But she was brilliantly self-educated and able at once to shine in London literary circles. It was, however, her novels of English rural life that brought her fame, starting with Adam Bede, published under her new pen name in 1859, and reaching a zenith with Middlemarch in 1871. Eliot was a devoutly moral woman but lived for 25 years with a man who already had a wife. It is indicative of the respect and love that she inspired in her most devoted readers that Queen Victoria was one of them.

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    Reviews for The Mill on the Floss

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    • 5/5
      THE MILL ON THE FLOSS: I have to ask if George Eliot could have devised a more off-putting title for her 1864 coming of age novel about Maggie Tulliver? I mean, I get it. The relentless energy of the river Floss is capital L Life, and the mill that takes its energy from the river is the ephemeral structure we call lowercase (individual) life. And perhaps, at a certain time in England’s history, a title like that made your book fly off the shelves, who knows? In the teen years of the 21st century, the 579 page classic is a hard sell. Luckily, audiobooks came to the rescue. Talented narrators enhance descriptive paragraphs with a sense of meaningful importance and pages of dialect that I would normally skip over come alive as the intelligible speech of real (and funny and mean) people. I say “narrators” since there are several audiobook versions of THE MILL ON THE FLOSS and I have listened to--and fallen in love with--two of them (over 40 hours listening time--don’t judge me). The tale of THE MILL ON THE FLOSS is luxuriously character driven and tangled. Briefly, the Tulliver family lived a respectably comfortable existence, with enough money to send both children to boarding school. However, Maggie’s father mortgaged his wife’s belongings to cover a loan, then lost a protracted litigation with a lawyer which in turn meant loss of the mill and belongings. At this point the miller suffers a very timely collapse and repayment of his debts is left to teenaged Tom. The sudden change of public status hardens Tom’s already proud nature; his bitterness flows downstream to Maggie whose search for happiness seems forever thwarted. Giving up hope, she embraces acts of self-denial (inspired by The Imitation of Christ, a book popular then) to subdue passion in any guise. At the same time, she is lured into a forbidden friendship with a man her brother despises. Does Tom succeed in paying off his father’s debts? Does Maggie achieve happiness on any scale? Well, you’ll have to read (or preferably listen to) it to find out!Bullied (brother), patronized (father), ignored (mother), worshipped (two equally ineligible suitors), Maggie stands heads and shoulders above her contemporary fictional protagonists. This might be difficult, but imagine a mid-19th century Wednesday Addams--without the cool parents and relatives--totally disparaged by her family (except her father whose loving pet name for her is little wench; wait, that’s disparaging too), angrily driving nails into her wooden doll’s head and later switching to grating the doll body against fireplace bricks when the head starts to fall apart. Or an 1860s Anne Shirley cutting her unfashionably straight hair off rather than submit one more time to curling papers; pushing her perfect and innocent cousin Lucy into the mud because her (Maggie’s) brother was paying more attention to her; and running away to give the gypsies the benefit of her book knowledge, secretly aspiring to become their queen if only the travellers can see how smart she is. As a young woman, Maggie surpasses Jane Eyre in self control and self-sacrifice to become, in a much more dramatic way than Miss Eyre managed, the hero of her own story. I keep wondering how I managed to remain ignorant of Maggie Tulliver until now.The secondary characters are as colourful and riveting (and less caricatured) as any of Dickens’ creations. The Dodson sisters, Maggie’s aunts on her mother’s side, are literary descendants of Lady Catherine deBurgh, wealthy, miserly and cold. Their self-centeredness is entirely credible and at the same time astonishingly thorough. The conversations of Bob Jakins, a working child on the mill and later travelling salesman and investor, are laugh out loud funny. If he lived now, Bob would certainly be the most successful car salesman in town. Eliot is ambivalent in her depiction of Tom, Maggie’s brother and is thought to have based him on her own surly sibling (hence the ambivalence). Throughout THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, Maggie yearns for Tom’s love and approval above all else. By the end, she is calling him a Pharisee who has “no sense of [his] own imperfections and [his] own sins”. However, of the four loves Maggie embodies--sister, daughter, muse and lover--the love of a sister is key to the unfolding of the novel. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS is an epic flowing with satire and pathos, passion and asceticism. You will recognize the characters as they are as true to life as people from your own circle of relatives and acquaintances. Although the setting is more than 150 years ago, prejudice and ignorance haven’t changed much since then.Highly recommended to all in audiobook format. Of the two versions I’ve listened to, the one with Laura Paton is the one I would suggest you try. She takes her time with dialogue, laying on accents thick and rich. A delight to listen to!
    • 5/5
      The book is a masterpiece. The audio reading, so many voices, is excellent.
    • 4/5
      Stunning work of literature! I felt myself lost in Maggie. She's a true heroine. This classic work deserves more praise than it's given.
    • 5/5
      anguage with explicit sexual situations, pseudo taboo relationships, and descriptions of hot vigorous sex.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful reading George Elliott is rather amss amazing
    • 3/5
      From a technical point of view, I think that the writing is superb: the description are vivid (I particularly loved the description of Maggie as a little Medusa with her snakes shorn.) The book is a mixture of the earnest and the farcical, and at points is extremely funny. The structure is carefully built, with the different metaphors of the river reflecting the state of mind of the characters. I found the end very unsatisfying, I was close to the end of the book before I found Maggie sympathetic, and I thought it failed the chief standard of a novel: to be an involving narrative. I don't mind that the author speaks to the reader per se, but every time I got caught up in the narrative, it wasn't long before the story ground to a halt while Eliot delivered herself of a short essay. The nearly three pages asking the reader to think of villages on the Rhone and castles on the Rhine (neither of which I have ever seen), wore out my patience--it almost seemed like a joke. Both the critics that I read thought that modern readers were put off by the length of the book, but I can think of a lot of long modern novels. It's not so much the number of pages as the way they are filled. Maggie Tulliver is apparently a seriously disturbed child, surrounded by insensitive adults who certainly can't help her. I feel sorry for her, but I don't like her. Wanting to be loved isn't the same as being lovable. For most of the book, Maggie is pretty self-absorbed. I pity her for her unpleasant relatives, but that doesn't mean that I find her sympathetic by contrast. Maggie is destructively impulsive, probably hurting herself more than anyone else, but Eliot lost a great deal of my sympathy early on when Maggie allows her brother's rabbits to die of neglect. It is hard to understand how someone who is supposed to be devoted to him could have so completely forgotten his request to take care of them. The critics that I read pointed out that Maggie is always very sorry for what she does, but she is only sorry for how other people's annoyance will affect her. She never, until the end of the book, is remorseful at causing someone else pain. If she were, she would understand that her brother is reasonably angry, and not complain that he is cruel for not instantly forgiving her. Not to mention what the rabbits went through! Eliot's view of Maggie and her father is that they are as they are, they cannot help themselves, but everyone else is responsible for their own conduct and for accomodating the Tullivers. I find it hard to be sympathetic to them when Eliot was so scathing about everyone else. I am probably projecting 21st century standards back on a 19th century book, but Tulliver acts against the advice of his wife and goes bankrupt in a law suit, which is rather self-centered and bullying. Maggie (and I suppose Eliot) feel that he should not be blamed for this. Certainly there is no point at railing at a person who is nearly comatose with distress, but he is in fact seriously at fault. [added later: I am reminded a bit of Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Both wives are presented in a very unflattering light as weak and trivial, but in fact they may be said to have a better grasp of reality than their more sympathetically portrayed but somewhat irresponsible spouses. One has to wonder what the authors were thinking in describing these women.] I found Maggie much more sympathetic in Book 6 and after, but it and her romantic problems seemed a little contrived. The change in her from Book 5 is only partially accounted for; a lot of it is obviously just a set up for the Dramatic Ending. I would like the book better if Eliot featured some intelligent resolution to Maggie's problems: she could have learned not to be so emotionally dependent upon her brother, she could have made another life for herself. The problems of her love life are indeed a dilemma and not easily solved, but the ending really seems like a cheat. I hope Eliot didn't mean this as encouragement for woman who found themselves at odds with social expectations. Even the reconciliation between Maggie and her brother makes me scoff. They had a big reconciliation scene earlier in the book and it didn't last, so this one doesn't seem meaningful. It is like the end of a television drama where decades of misunderstanding are permanently resolved in the last 60 seconds. This is certainly a piece of literary history, and there are some great examples of writing in it, but I don't think it has held up as a novel.
    • 3/5
      Pretty grim. Pretty grim. I did enjoy the author's wry commentary throughout.
    • 4/5
      This book was good, but slow. This will mark my fourth George Eliot novel. You can say now that I'm a fan of her writing. I liked the sister/brother relationship, although it ends bittersweet. One thing I learned for Eliot's books already is don't expect a happy ending. With all that said, I think I read this book at a perfect time. I wasn't looking for something quick, fun, or happy. I wouldn't say this is a hard book to read, just slow and you need to take you time.
    • 4/5
      Follows from childhood the lives of siblings, Maggie and Tom, who grow up on the eponymous mill land in the 1840s. The novel is the story of their relationship, their fluctuating devotion to one another, through the varied fortune of their family. My feelings toward the book are as varied as Maggie's and Tom's for one another; at times I really enjoyed its humorous depiction of stodgy, stuffy aunts and self-amused uncles, but by the end I became frustrated with the "Oh, I mustn't" "Oh, but you MUST" "Oh, but I MUSTN'T"-ness of it all. And the ending, although I understand the reasoning behind it, still felt abrupt and unsuited, and seemed (to me, at least) to make the previous plot elements pointless even while making its own sort of (overly-) dramatic Point. Also, I have a low tolerance for men being So Very Put Out because a woman doesn't behave the way he thinks she should, which happens on multiple occasions here. Gah.
    • 5/5
      This story, written in 1860, by George Eliot is a story of two siblings, Tom and Maggie, who live with their mother and father at the mill on the River Floss. I was impressed with the the imagery that Eliot was able to create with words. I could see the mill and river when she described them. I also was impressed with the character development. I so wanted to love Maggie and hate Tom but just when I thought I was right, the author could turn it around by giving you positives for Tom and negatives for Maggie. These characters were both ones you could feel sympathy for, though much easier to with Maggie than Tom. The author also gave us a picture of family dynamics and faults, community positives and negatives, and the difficulties of being a female in this time in history. The plot is full of symbolism with the mill, the Floss, St. Oggs, Maggie's eyes. The themes; loss of innocence, communal verses individual interest, gender disparity, difficulty of choice, renunciation and sacrifice. Example of how the author could paint a picture; “These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows - such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.”A quote that looks at the loss of innocence from childhood; “The two slight youthful figures soon grew indistinct on the distant road - were soon lost behind the projecting hedgerow.They had gone forth together into their new life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.”
    • 5/5
      Stunning. The most enthralling George Eliot I have read thus far, I enjoyed The Mill on the Floss, her second novel, more than her better known Middlemarch and Silas Marner. Seemingly insignificant anecdotes shed light on siblings Maggie and Tom as they grow older, and it is their characterisation which I remember most. The finale felt extravagant, fabricated and Hardy-esque, set apart from the pastoral delicacy pervading the rest of the novel. While this doesn't suit my preference, it demonstrates George Eliot's versatility in illuminating drama as well as character.I won't spoil the plot, but will share a flavour of what you will find. Like George Eliot's other novels, the themes are pastoral life, struggle against circumstances, familial bonds, interplay of personalities. Specific to The Mill on the Floss, this is a story of growing up and falling in love. But this more than a well-told coming of age story. George Eliot is at her best and most entertaining in her psychological insights. Some examples are below.On Tom and a fellow pupil:-
      If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.
      On Maggie and her childhood persona:-
      The world outside the books was not a happy one, Maggie felt: it seemed to be a world where people behaved the best to those they did not pretend to love, and that did not belong to them. And if life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie?
      You will find, to the irritation of some but joy of others, wonderfully witty metaphors:-
      Imagine a truly respectable and amiable hen, by some portentous anomaly, taking to reflection and inventing combinations by which she might prevail on Hodge not to wring her neck, or send her and her chicks to market: the result could hardly be other than much cackling and fluttering.
      I see George Eliot as a highly intelligent writer, but in this novel she also expresses deep feeling. Perhaps this is because The Mill on the Floss is supposedly the most autobiographical of her works. Even the minor characters are treated carefully. This is the novel which truly made me realise why George Eliot is considered a master of realism.
      If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their Bibles opened more easily at some parts than others, it was because of dried tulip-petals, which had been distributed quite impartially, without preference for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal.
      The love story is cleverly and realistically constructed, in words relevant even today. A few choice quotes:-
      They had begun the morning with an indifferent salutation, and both had rejoiced in being aloof from each other, like a patient who has actually done without his opium, in spite of former failures in resolution.
      Why was he not thoroughly happy? Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
      Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them.
      The Mill on the Floss is an excellent introduction to Victorian literature.
    • 3/5
      Wonderful characters and dialogue, but I shall never forgive Eliot for what she does to them at the end.
    • 5/5
      This book is so funny and sometimes dark. It's like if Dickens had been a woman. Maggie Tulliver is one of my favorite literary characters right alongside Scout Finch & Francie Nolan and Scarlett O'Hara. I'm really looking forward to reading Middlemarch because it is supposed to be George Eliot's best.
      This book, at times, reminded me of Great Expectations, the way the bumbling adults would make fools of themselves.
      Anyway, a wonderfully surprising read and I highly recommend it.
    • 3/5
      After beautiful opening descriptions, an energetic plot, beginning and concluding with an embrace in the Floss, is slowed to tedium by the endless Tulliver and Dodson womens' conversations and their fixations.Maggie Tulliver showed a wonderful rebellious strength in a family with an often cruel older brother, a flighty mother,and an over indulgent father. Unfortunately for her and George Eliot's readers, she descends into a pointless chasmof self-chastising morality, broken only when she overcomes pity to agree to marry one man, then falls in love withher cousin's boyfriend. The only mystery in the predictable plot comes when Maggie and Tom, river people who knew better, take a rowboat out into a flood.
    • 2/5
      While I immediately disliked the way everyone except her father treated Maggie, I was mildly enjoying this classic about the struggles of a middle class family in Victorian England until the final 2 books (about the final 20%). I found Maggie's behavior in these final sections so intensely irritating that it ruined the book for me.

      This is the 3rd George Eliot book I have read & overall I haven't been a fan. Guess I will skip Daniel Deronda and Adam Bede (both on the Guardian's list) at least for the near future!

      Nadia May was excellent even though I didn't care for the book & I would recommend her narration.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this. The opening chapters are very funny and Maggie is adorable. I like it when she pushes Lucy into the pond and how this and other early things pre-figure events later in the novel. Very clever. I liked how the aunts act as a Greek chorus early on, later replaced by the authorial voice. It must have been a very personal novel for Eliot to write. I heard that her brother refused to speak to her for 20 years, but she never let's herself be overcome by emotion. My sister refused to speak to me for 12 years for the same reasons.
    • 3/5
      This book starts strong; with quirky, believable characters and a poignant setting that was obviously a well-loved memory of the author's childhood. I frequently laughed out loud at some antic of Maggie's or a description of her woodenheaded, morally upright Aunt Glegg.

      Once the characters grew up, however, it degenerated into a tragic romance with Maggie as `Mary Sue', and the ending! - don't get me started.
    • 3/5
      I read this a little too long ago to quite remember it well. I have an image of the mill being swept away by the end of the novel but I don't remember what it all meant.

      I remember there was a sentence about a third of the way through the novel describing the state of the marriage between an aunt and uncle of the protagonist. The sentence was about a page long and started out indicating that the uncle was in the garden and as in a long spiral seemed to draw out the psychology of the marriage between the aunt and uncle and the aunt's philosophy of marriage and the uncle's manner of coping with his wife. It left me delirious. Twice in my life when I have walked into a book store that stocked "The Mill of the Floss" I have looked for and found this sentence. It bolsters me to still be entertained in rereading it even though I have no idea what the novel means.
    • 4/5
      This is an epic Northern tale of a chalk and cheese brother and sister, Maggie and Tom Tulliver, trying to make their way in the world. Much of the time I feel they are both round pegs in square holes, neither cut out for what conventional life has in store for them. However brother and sisterly love seems to be the thread that binds them together thoughout their entwined and estranged lives to the dramatic climax of their story.
    • 4/5
      I finished it! Less than 24 hours until the book club meets and I've finished this 600-page odyssey. (Forgive me if I spend a little time congratulating myself.) Anyway, this novel is primarily a brother and sister story, as the trials of Tom and Maggie Tulliver are chronicled and explored. Maggie certainly emerges as the more sympathetic sibling (a bias of the author, perhaps?), but the influence of society and gender roles weighs heavily on both Tom and Maggie throughout the novel. Nevertheless, George Eliot brings this novel to a perfect close and I have never felt so satisfied with such a sad conclusion.
    • 4/5
      This has to be my least favourite George Eliot novel. It is just so depressing all the way through. The Tulliver siblings lose their home and social standing due to their father's litigiousness. Then Maggie, unable to marry the man she has promised herself to, falls for the "coxcomb", Stephen Guest. Nothing good happens to any one and all the characters make disappointing choices. The characterization is, as always in Eliot, excellent, in that each person is made up of a complex mixture of good and evil, wisdom and foolishness. I sent a long time thinking about Maggie and her failings and puzzling decisions and about Tom and his narrow-mindedness and even about Philip and the weight he placed on a promise drawn from a very young, inexperienced girl, so it clearly is brilliantly-written, but the hopelessness of the whole thing prevents me from giving it more stars.
    • 5/5
      I simply love George Elliots writing. She draws a picture of life in an age where social lives were changing, where women were daring to be counted by whatever means it took.
    • 2/5
      I enjoyed the humor of the book but I didn't find Maggie the strong character that she's supposed to be. She's far too dependent on her brother for her own good.
    • 2/5
      I really expected to love George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss -- I adored Middlemarch and Victorian novels are really my genre. But boy, I really struggled with this book. The story follows Maggie Tulliver, who wants to be loved and seeks approval from her family who is reluctant to give it. She grows up in find love in too many places but still can't find approval. There was a bizarre twist of a ending that really didn't make a whole lot of sense in terms of the rest of story.Overall, I just found this book incredibly dull. Eliot's long expositions did nothing for me and I honestly had trouble staying awake for more an a few pages. It got a bit interesting in the middle, then fell apart again. Just a dud of a book for me.
    • 4/5
      I read this when I was studying in England and I have distinct memories of sitting on benches in Regents Park with my library copy. The copy I was reading was one of those charming small British hardcovers with thin pages. I can practically feel the pages, the sun on my face, and the light wind tossing my hair around as I think about it. I'm sure that contributes to my fondness for the book.
    • 3/5
      It is easy to fall in love with the heroine of this story, Maggie Tulliver. Although she wants to be the ideal Victorian female, she can't help herself. She is bold, affectionate, impulsive and passionate and just can't fill the role of the passive and obedient daughter. What Maggie wants more than anything is the love and approval of her older brother Tom. Tom is the opposite of Maggie. He is responsible and steady and where Maggie's personality overflows with warmth and affection, Tom is more cold and deliberate. Although Tom loves his sister, he can't help but disapprove of her inappropriate behavior. The Mill on the Floss follows Maggie and Tom as they grow from children into adults. The Tulliver family has owned the mill for several generations, but Maggie and Tom's father makes some poor choices and ends up losing the mill due to a legal dispute. Maggie and Tom's lives change as they have to work hard to survive, Tom entering business on the docks and Maggie working as a teacher. Although Maggie works hard to help out and be the obedient daughter, she continues to disappoint her family by first falling in love with the son of the man who caused the Tulliver bankruptcy and then falling in love with a man who is betrothed to her cousin.



      Although I enjoyed the story and the writing, I was so disappointed with the ending. Maggie gives up everything to try to be that obedient daughter and finally get Tom's approval. It almost seemed like the 'moral' to this story is that reason is better than heart or passion. And Tom - what a smug condescending idiot! So undeserving of a sister like Maggie.
    • 5/5
      [SPOILER] This book really caught me. The super-charged melodramtic ending really hit me. The utter rapidity of its all-embracing solution jolted me: "The boat reappeared--but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted, living through again in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together." In this line, the whole book appears as a carefully sculpured whole--the long and rather dreary opening chapters are seen as an essential part to create the drama of the closing. The impact of the closing is so vivid, that the one-age Conclusion at first disturbed: but even it is just right: the following I thought overwhelming: "Near that brick grave there was a tomb erected, very soon after the flood, for two bodies that were found in close embrace; and it was visited at different moments by two men who both felt that their keenest joy and keenest sorrow were forever buried there." What a story--I now will certainly have to read more Geroge Eliot.
    • 4/5
      I think it will take me a few days to process this novel. Eliot brilliantly made me feel, care and relate to the characters. The novel follows Maggie and her family the Tullivers through happiness, loss and redemption. I absolutely loved Maggie but her striving to goodness drove me crazy. As I said I need more time to wrap my mind around the ending which was so devestating to me.
    • 5/5
      I suspect between this novel and Middlemarch, George Eliot is becoming my favorite nineteenth-century novelist. I wish she were still alive so that I could write her fan letters.

      The Mill on the Floss is funny and moving and philosophical. Eliot does so many different things well; she's witty and detached, and then she writes a love scene that makes your knees go wobbly. Middlemarch struck me the same way - it's incredibly romantic, and then it does things with that romance, crazy thematic plot things, that sometimes make you feel like the author has punched you in the stomach.

      I think George Eliot and Joss Whedon would probably get along.

      The novel is also cool because it's sort of a novel about adultery without actually being about adultery. It feels very modern and unflinching, the more so because George Eliot actually spent much of her adult life in a happy but socially-isolating relationship out of wedlock, so she had perspective on The System.

      The last couple hundred pages are incredibly intense, perhaps the more so because I read them in one go on a very long train ride, most of which was spent on the edge of my (not very comfortable) seat. It's one of those novels whose ending is absolutely unguessable and yet feels vitally important; "Holy crap," I asked myself, "how is this going to end, and will I be able to live a happy and well-adjusted life after I finish it?"

      I'm still working on that happy and well-adjusted part. The ending... well, is it ever an ending. Words like "mythic" and "apocalyptic" do not give it justice. I'm still not sure how I feel about it - in some ways she gave me just the ending I didn't want, but she did it in such a way that I had to admire. Also, it is very, very intriguing and makes me want to write essays about it, which is usually a good thing.

      Great characters, great plot, great themes. A very well-rounded novel.
    • 4/5
      This is a beautifully written novel. Its got some journeyman flaws, its a little uneven and lumpy in a few spots, but on the whole its exceptionally well drawn, all the characters are wonderful and it has an unshakeable sense of place, of being rooted in all the complex interlinking minutiae that make up the ecology of a real landscape and a real society.

      So why four stars? Because eventually I just got fed up with watching people kick Maggie Tulliver around. If she'd ever once gotten even a little bit angry with any of the many mostly well meaning people who treat her like complete crap, if she'd ever even tried to fight back, even if she failed, well I'd be so on her side. But as it is, its like reading an exceptionally beautifully written Mr Bill show. Watch Sluggo and Mr Hand take away absolutely everything that makes Maggie's life worth having one by one by one, and stomp on her head in passing. Oh NOOOO Mr Bill!

      At some point, for me, it just becomes too melodramatic, too "may I have some more sir," and I end up just irritated with the character and the author. Get up and DO something woman! Stop letting everybody kick you around the landscape, what are you, a punching bag?

      YMMV*

      *Your mileage may vary.