The Mill on the Floss

Summary

Intelligent, headstrong Maggie Tulliver grows up at odds with her family's expectations and her brother Tom's rigid sense of duty, torn between her own desires and the small, unforgiving community of St. Ogg's. Eliot follows Maggie from childhood into a doomed romantic entanglement that scandalizes the town and estranges her from Tom. The novel's sympathy for a woman crushed by provincial judgment made it one of Eliot's most personal and affecting books.