I think George Eliot is my favourite 19th century novelist. This is brilliant. I first read it as an A level set text probably nearly 50 years ago (help) and the copy in our bookshelf is full of teenagerly annotations (in ink, very influenced by my mother’s rather bitter anger against anything she perceived as enforced convention). The book itself is an old Everyman classic and is falling to pieces.
Maggie Tulliver, the heroine, has 3 lovers – ambiguously her brother Tom, Philip Wakeham, the physically deformed son of her father’s bitter enemy the lawyer Wakeham and Stephen Guest, fiancé also of her cousin Lucy, and a more conventional beau than Philip. Her life is torn apart by her feelings for these three men – loyalty to her brother and father, for whom Wakeham and any member of his family is anathema, love and sympathy for Philip, and more charged, dangerous and erotic love for Stephen Guest.
As a backdrop, her mother’s family the Dodson sisters represent Victorian conventionality and morality, of whom Mrs Glegg is the most extreme, although her outspoken views are outspoken in their loyalty to Maggie (qua family member) after her disgrace near the end. The ending is quite precipitate – Tom and Maggie drowning as the Floss floods suddenly in the last few pages. Brilliant.
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