Dec 30, 2009

The Mill on the Floss | Themes

Ordinary People's Lives
At the time of its publication, The Mill on the Floss received critical attention, both good and bad, because it was one of the first novels to consider the lives and problems of middle-class English country people and to present their lives in great detail. Some readers of the time found this fascinating; others were repelled by the amount of time Eliot spent exploring the lives of "common" people. For example, Leslie Stephen, writing in Cornhill Magazine in 1881, wrote that no other writer had so clearly presented "the essential...