Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | The Mill on the Floss - Janet H. Freeman (essay date 1977)

Janet H. Freeman (essay date 1977)

SOURCE: "Authority in The Mill on the Floss," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 56, 1977, pp. 374-88.

[In this essay, Freeman contends that the omniscient narration of The Mill on the Floss renders the novel's ending appropriate.]

"By God she is a wonderful woman."—John Blackwood, upon reading the next-to-last chapter of The Mill on the Floss

Looking up from The Mill on the Floss, generations of readers have been drawn to comment on George Eliot herself—often without John Blackwood's admiring enthusiasm, but nearly always with the sense that the history of Maggie and Tom Tulliver is a highly personal narrative, as significant to the storyteller as it is to her audience. Significant, yet at the same time troubling: "What does it all come to except that human life is inexplicable, and that women who feel this find the feeling painful?"...

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