The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a brother and sister growing up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss at its junction with the more minor River Ripple near the village of St. Ogg's in England, probably in the 1820s after the Napoleonic Wars but before the Reform Act of 1832. Both the river and the village are fictional.?The novel spans a period of 10 to 15 years, from Tom's and Maggie's childhood up until their deaths in a flood on the Floss.

The book is fictional autobiography in part, reflecting the disgrace that George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) herself had while in a lengthy relationship with a married man, George Henry Lewes.?Maggie Tulliver holds the central role in the book. The story begins when she is 9 years old, 13 years into the Tullivers' marriage. Her relationship with her older brother Tom, and her romantic relationships with Philip Wakem, a hunchbacked, sensitive, and intellectual friend, and with Stephen Guest, a vivacious young socialite in St. Ogg's and assumed fiance of Maggie's cousin Lucy Deane, constitute the most significant narrative threads.