This is the version I'm reading.
Currently reading: The
Mill on the Floss by
George Eliot
Reason: I really liked Middlemarch and
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, and I’d like to study what else she’s written.
Book One: Boy and
Girl: The
story begins by describing the Floss, and then Dorlcote Mill, the main scene
for the whole story. I didn’t really
consider (for some reason) that George Eliot wrote a lot of provincial novels
like this one, but she did - like Adam
Bede and Silas Marner. In my head her literature was more like
Charles Dickens or William Makepeace Thackeray and although her later stories
that I read were more like that, her writing is much more soft and easy to
understand than I thought. This story,
so far, reminds me of Little Women where it has foreshadowing and hefty
descriptions of things, but contains a lot of dialogue for most of the book.
At the beginning we’re introduced to Mr. And
Mrs. Tulliver, who have decided to send Tom (a young lad of 13) to study at a different school. Maggie, a high spirited young girl of 9 years
old, has missed her brother terribly, and they are very close. One thing I’ve noticed when reading it is
that it seems like Tom does things to purposely get Maggie upset, and then
Maggie gets in trouble. Maggie though is
VERY dramatic and impulsive (I mean, she cuts off all of her own hair when her
family is talking about how pretty her cousin Lucy’s hair is). I find them kind of irritating as children,
so I hope they get better as they get older.
Anyway, Maggie and Tom have lots of
adventures while he is home from school, including Maggie’s escape to the
Gypsies down the road when Tom is paying more attention to Lucy and not her. That was pretty hilarious. I’m expecting something really bad to happen
to one of them in the upcoming chapters.
It’s like Eliot is just hinting at something, enough for you pick up on
it but not clearly enough to know what it is.
This is going to take me awhile to finish I think, even though it is only 500 some pages, because I'm working on a craft swap project on the American Girl Playthings Board, as well as practicing the piano and getting ready for my first year of college (YIKES).
