Finally, I’m just 50 pages from the end of The Mill on the Floss. After long, mildly absorbing depictions of the protagonist’s childhood, Dickensian aunts and uncles, and father’s financial ruin, the story has really taken off in the last stretch. Suddenly, Maggie is torn between (a) her deep affection for the sensitive hunchback her overbearing brother forbids her to see because his father was their father’s nemesis, and (b) her forbidden passion for her cousin’s cocky, frivolous boyfriend. At long last, the Victorian melodrama I crave!
Needless to say, no matter how much I keep urging her to make the smart choice and live a happy life with the nice guy (and tell her annoying brother to go fuck himself), she goes with the forbidden passion, with tragic results. Though what happens is tame by today’s standards (there’s certainly no sex whatsoever—more of an unfortunate misunderstanding), apparently it was so scandalous at the time that (the Oxford World’s Classics edition’s introduction helpfully tells me) “Bertrand Russell’s mother, four years before her marriage, was permitted to read only the first half of The Mill on the Floss. ‘I should have thought Maggie would turn out very well when she was older,’ she wrote to her brother, ‘but I am told that she is so wicked.’” Hee, prudery.
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