The Mill on the Floss (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

In an 1860 issue of the Saturday Review, a reviewer commented that The Mill on the Floss, in comparison to Eliot's earlier novel Adam Bede, "shows no falling off nor any exhaustion of power." The reviewer also compared Eliot's "minuteness of painting and a certain archness of style" to the work of Jane Austen and the "wide scope of her remarks, and her delight in depicting strong and wayward feelings" to the work of Charlotte Brontë. According to this reviewer, Eliot's greatest achievement in the novel is that "for the first time in fiction, [she has] invented or disclosed the family life of the English farmer, and the class to which he belongs." By using local dialect, vivid characterization, and occasional comedy, Eliot engenders trust in the reader. In addition, the reviewer commented, she "is full of meditation on some of the most difficult problems of life," such as the destinies, possibilities, and spiritual situation of all her characters. However, the reviewer disliked Eliot's emphasis on painful circumstances, her occasional overemphasis of moral issues, and her occasional discursiveness.

In that same year, a reviewer wrote in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine that the novel was "incontestably superior" to Adam Bede, because readers are brought to know the characters so intimately that they cannot help reading steadily to the end of the story. The reviewer noted, "And the interest, when once fairly started, though not rapid, never flags." The reviewer praised Eliot's characterization, use of middle-class protagonists, and her unobtrusive moral message.

I. M. Luyster wrote in Christian Examiner in 1861 that "since half the book is devoted to the childhood of the principal characters, it loses with some readers a portion of its interest as a romance." He also objected to Eliot's occasional use of "gratuitous vulgarity, for which the author is solely responsible," which, he noted, was "a great blemish, especially in a woman's book." However, he wrote, this vulgarity seldom appears in The Mill on the Floss and then only in some of the characterizations.

Leslie Stephen wrote in 1881 in Cornhill Magazine that Eliot was "one of the very few writers of our day to whom the name 'great' could be conceded with any plausibility."

By 1901, however, Eliot's reputation had declined. In Victorian Prose Masters, W. C. Brownell wrote that this was probably because turn-of-the-century readers were not interested in Eliot's psychological analysis of characters, and he remarked, "We have had a surfeit of psychological fiction since George Eliot's day." Thus, even though Eliot was "at the head of psychological novelists," her work did not garner the praise it deserved. He summed up, "No other novelist gives one such a poignant sense that life is immensely serious, and no other is surer of being read, and read indefinitely, by serious readers."

In Reference Guide to English Literature, Walter Allen wrote that Eliot "is probably over-rated" in England but remarked that "in critical estimation she leads all other Victorian novelists and is seen as the one nineteenth-century English novelist who can be mentioned in the same breath as Tolstoy."

Lettice Cooper, in British Writers, wrote that the book "has both the strength and the weakness of an autobiographical novel. There is no more vivid picture in English fiction of the sorrows and sufferings of a child." The book's weakness, according to Cooper, is that in depicting Maggie, Eliot did not have enough objectivity about Maggie's character, but at the same time, this gives her portrait of Maggie increased "freshness and intensity." However, Cooper praised the novel's "superb setting of English family life, narrated with humor and shrewd observation." She also noted, "The Dodsons are the very marrow of the English middle class of the last century, a tradition that still survives."