

Edited by Oliver Lovesey, Broadview Editions.Įrmarth, Elizabeth. “A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879.” George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879, and Uncollected Writings, ed. “‘Shattering’ and ‘Violent’ Forces: Gender, Ecology, and Catastrophe in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.” Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914 11 (1): 38–57.īlackwood, John. Moving accidents by flood and field: The arable and tidal worlds of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. KeywordsĪrcher, Jayne Elisabeth, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas. Despite the novel’s epic focus on natural history, tending to environmental scales beyond the human and. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species(1859) was influential to Eliot, being published toward the end of the novel’s composition. The Mill on the Floss draws extensively on the emerging science of evolution and tends to ongoing geological debates between earlier theories of catastrophism and Charles Lyell’s contemporary theory of uniformitarianism in his work Principles of Geology (1830–1833). Ogg’s in the historical region of Lincolnshire, England, known predominantly for its wetland environment and seasonal flooding. The novel spans Maggie’s childhood and teenage years and takes place in the fictional provincial town of St. It is a coming-of-age story about Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom.

Published in three volumes by William Blackwood in 1860, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss precedes her more famous novel Middlemarch (1871) and is one of her first novels.
