Rereading: George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss

From The Guardian:

Tom-and-Maggie-overwhelme-001 On 5 March 1860, the scientist and journalist GH Lewes reported to the publisher John Blackwood that “Mrs Lewes is getting her eyes redder and swollener every morning as she lives through her tragic story. But there is such a strain of poetry to relieve the tragedy that the more she cries, and the readers cry, the better say I.” “Mrs Lewes” was, of course, George Eliot, and “the tragic story” on which she was working so damply was The Mill on the Floss, published by Blackwood 150 years ago next week. What was making Eliot cry was having to write the last few pages of her novel in which the heroine Maggie Tulliver and her estranged brother Tom drown in the swollen River Floss, locked together “in an embrace never to be parted”.

More than mere melodrama, the watery hug represented a wishful reworking of Eliot's fractured relationship with her own adored brother, with whom she had grown up on the Warwickshire family farm in the 1820s. Ever since she had written to Isaac Evans three years before to explain that she was now cohabiting in London with the married Lewes – “Mrs Lewes” was a term of social convenience, her legal name remained Mary Ann Evans – the rigidly respectable Isaac had refused to have anything to do with her. Even more hurtfully, he had instructed their sister to break off contact too. This silence was to stretch bleakly over the coming quarter of a century. The brother and sister who, like Tom and Maggie, had once “roamed the daisied fields together” in loving childhood, would never meet again.

More here.