Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. 

As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother, a close friend who is also the son of her family’s worst enemy, and a charismatic but dangerous suitor. 

With its poignant portrayal of sibling relationships, “The Mill on the Floss” is considered George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel; it is also one of her most powerful and moving.

The story was adapted as a film, “The Mill on the Floss”, in 1937, and as a BBC series in 1978 starring Christopher Blake, Pippa Guard, Judy Cornwell, Ray Smith and Anton Lesser.

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was also a translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. 

She was born in 1819 at a farmstead in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, where her father was estate manager. Mary Ann, the youngest child and a favorite of her father’s, received a good education for a young woman of her day. Influenced by a favorite governess, she became a religious evangelical as an adolescent.

Her first published work was a religious poem. Through a family friend, she was exposed to Charles Hennell’s “An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity”.

Her 1872 work “Middlemarch” has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

Source:Tehran Times