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    The Mill on the Floss
    The Mill on the Floss
    The Mill on the Floss
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    The Mill on the Floss

    Written by George Eliot

    Narrated by Sara Kestelman

    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 in 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 dateFeb 1, 2010
    ISBN9789629545284
    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

    4/5

    60 ratings54 reviews

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    • 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.
    • 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 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 1/5
      I am a little surprised by this book's high rating, as I consider myself well-read and well-educated, and therefore (supposedly) capable of discerning and appreciating fine literature. However, The Mill on the Floss was one of the most painful reading experiences of my life (the other being a textbook I had to read for one of my classes). It was tedious, overblown, vacuous...in my opinion, of course.
    • 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.
    • 4/5
      I quite enjoyed this... until the ending. The terrible, terrible ending. Seriously, "And then Maggie woke up, and it was all a dream" would have been ten times better.I'm also left wondering whether Eliot, like Dickens, got paid by the word.
    • 4/5
      This book is talk about Maggie who has an older brother Tom; the whole family was lived in a mill. Unfortunately, one day, the father lost the count case, so he need pay a lot of money, and sold out the mill to his enemy Mr. Wakem. But, Maggie fall in love with Philip who was Mr. Wakem’s son. When Maggie’s brother found they were dating, he wanted Maggie to make a choice to choose family or lover. Sadly, she had to choose the family. When her father was died, she was turned to St.Ogg’s and stay with her cousin Lucy. Then Lucy’s lover Stephen who fall in love with Maggie, and he managed to moved another place with Maggie, although Maggie did not want to. When Maggie’s brother known about this, he felt the whole family was shamed, and nobody believe Maggie. Actually, Maggie was still love Philip, so when she received the letter from Philip, she was cried. At this time. It was flood, she rowed the boat to save her brother, but when they want to save the other people, the boat was crashed by a large piece of wood. Both of they were died. The end of story is very impressed, although freedom is the stuff that Maggie always wanted, and she wanted to marry with Philip too. But she still chooses the family and her brother.
    • 3/5
      Wonderful characters and dialogue, but I shall never forgive Eliot for what she does to them at the end.
    • 2/5
      I liked the book okay until the end. I won't spoil it for anyone; however, once I finished the book I felt so let down! I hope other people had a better reaction to Eliot's version of realism.
    • 2/5
      aaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhh! great struggle and a lot of naught. i found it wearing e'en though i did finish it. i'm not sure i'm cut out for some of the classics. like this and ethan frome.
    • 3/5
      Some parts of it were pretty good actually, but the brother was a douche & the ending was a cop-out. Progressively got more boring.
    • 2/5
      While a "Classic," The Mill on the Floss is not up par. Dry and entirely too many pages for the story told.
    • 5/5
      This book continues, sort of, the story started in Three Day Road. Xavier, the WWI soldier who came home missing a leg and with a dependence on morphine in Three Day Road, lived a long life and fathered at least 3 children, Antoine, Will and . One of the narrators of the book is his son Will and the other narrator is his granddaughter, Annie. Will's narration is from a hospital bed where he is in a coma although we don't know, until the very end, what caused it. Annie's story is told to Will in the hopes that the words will get through his coma.Will used to be a bush pilot until something happened to his wife and children when he gave up flying. The story about his family is a tragedy that Will never really got over. He drinks a lot and hunts and traps for a living. One day he runs afoul of Marius Netmaker, a drug pusher and all round bad guy. Marius' younger brother, Gus, and Will's niece, Suzanne, had run off south together. Suzanne is gorgeous and becomes a highly sought after model in Toronto and Montreal and New York City. Gus, it appears, is the southern connection for the Netmaker drug enterprise but suddenly he and Suzanne disappear. Annie goes to Toronto for a holiday with her friend Eva but ends up staying to look for Suzanne. She meets a mute Anishinabe, Gordon (also known as Painted Tongue), when she is beaten up by some white punks and Gordon saves her. He becomes her protector but not her lover as Annie travels in the path of Suzanne.Will and Annie share a lot of characteristics and when I think about it, Xavier had many of those characteristics as well. They are all impulsive and jump into situations without a lot of forethought. Xavier and Will and to a certain extent Annie developed dependencies on drugs and alcohol. However, on a positive note, they all care deeply about their friends and when they fall in love it is long-lasting. Of course, they all have a deep tie to the natural world. Will spends months living by himself and supplies his needs with fish and game. Annie teaches Gordon how to trap when they come back to Moose River. They acknowledge the gifts of the Creator and don't take more than the land can spare.I've grown quite attached to the Bird family. This past week the Globe and Mail had a question and answer session with Joseph Boyden and my question to him was whether he was going to fill in the events of the intervening years between Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce. This was his answer:Indeed, in the third instalment of the trilogy, I've figured out a way where I can both look back through history to the time when Xavier returns home from the war and even move forward a few years into the future in a way that I hope works well. I guess we'll just have to wait and see...Well, I'm waiting Joseph and I hope it won't be too long.
    • 4/5
      Another GE novel that made me cry... although I found the ending a bit weak, it is grand literature as only Eliot can write.
    • 5/5
      If you can find an introduction or timeline with "George Eliot"s life prior to reading this story, it will be all the more poignat. I am pretty sure she is writing her own story- the social context is totally amazing, and makes it all the more meaningful. Major themes surrounding the plight of women in the late 1800s, but also incredibly humourous. "This is a puzzling world, if you drive your wagons in a hurry you may light on an awkward corner!"
    • 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!
    • 4/5
      Ooh, what an abrupt ending! I hadn't read any George Eliot, to my shame, and found this on my bookshelf. I'm so glad I picked it up, I thoroughly enjoyed all her observations and explanations of character and actions - a really mature, inspiring piece of writing. And I laughed so often. I think my favourite passage is her take on destiny: "'Character' - says Novalis, in on eof his questionable aphorisms - 'character is destiny.' But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet's having married Ophelia and got through life with a reputation of sanity notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair dughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in law."Eliot is a really generous writer. Tom is pretty reviled by some of the readers who have written reviews here, but I think that's unfair. Maggie's love can be pretty incomprehensible, towards Tom and more so towards Stephen Guest, who isn't drawn particularly clearly but doesn't seem to merit the devotion of either Maggie or Lucy. But Tom is drawn in great detail, and Bob's affection for him, Uncle Deane's respect for him and the aunts' frustration with hm together with his own pride and moodiness all make sense. How delightful that awful Aunt Glegg comes good at the end as well with regards to Maggie. And Philip's last letter to Maggie is a beautiful piece of sincerety, deep love and a tremendously powerful understanding of a strength of reasoning, introspection and thoughfulness that saves him (and everyone else) from his suicide.
    • 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.
    • 4/5
      One of my favorite classic novels.
    • 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.
    • 5/5
      Some people really dislike the prose of George Eliot, but I disagree. This was the first novel of hers which I read and I thoroughly enjoyed. The plot is entertaining and she has great character development. I also remember going to my professor and saying that I wanted to write about nature, religion and something else (probably romance) in this novel, and then realizing that there was no way that a roughly six page essay could encompass all of those topics. I really enjoyed watching how these characters relationships with others affected their emotional journeys throughout the book. A great read.
    • 5/5
      This is the second of Eliot's books I have read (the first being Middlemarch), and I found the reading as compelling as the first. Eliot has a power of evoking characters that literally live off the pages as you read them; they make you laugh, weep and fume at what life tosses their way, much as the waves and floods of the Floss. The ending, I found, to be poignant rather than a cop-out. Whilst I too would have loved a happy ending where Maggie finds social vindication and true marital and lifelong bliss, it's all too unfortunate that life doesn't end that way. Eliot's brief but powerful portrayal of St Ogg's women and their condemnation of Maggie's so-called sins, highlights the impossibility of such an ending.While Eliot does indulge in an obvious parallel with the Virgin myth, and some might call this 'convenient', I found it critical to the enlightenment of Tom's infamous narrow mind. Debatable though the denouement may be, I found the experience of reading this work entirely engrossing and enjoyable from beginning to end. You can't help but care for the characters that Eliot creates, she is a brilliant artist at her usual best in this work.
    • 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.
    • 5/5
      Maggie's story is tragic, and the ending left me in tears. She was a character that acted impulsively, and drew my sympathies. Her brother Tom may have been annoying and sometimes cruel, but he was her connection to her past ... who she was, and with her in the end. The end...no longer divided, Maggie and Tom will be forever immortalized by unconditional love, despite their dysfunction.