George Eliot: THE MILL ON THE FLOSS

George Eliot: THE MILL ON THE FLOSS

THE MILL ON THE FLOSS is the story of the Tulliver family of Dorlcote Mill, on the river Floss, in England. Mainly it tells of Maggie Tulliver [Tulliver sounds like Gulliver!], an impulsive young girl who was swept on to womanhood by a current of strange circumstances: her love for the son of the man who ruined her father; the scorn heaped upon her when she runs away with another man; her passionate reconciliation with her brother. Against a simple rural background George Eliot has woven a classic tale of human hate and love.

MARY ANN EVANS (1819-80), who signed her novels "George Eliot," was born into the small-town, middle-class life about which she wrote so convincingly. Her father was an estate agent for a large landholder in Warwickshire. A man of considerable local importance, able to leave an estate that included a modest life income for Mary Ann, he was almost as inferior socially to the landed gentry as he was superior to the common laborers of the community. The family belonged to the same social class as the more prosperous farmers and tradesmen, the little entrepreneurs, the more plebeian lawyers, and a few of the ministers of religion. Mary Ann was not raised in a tradition of chivalry nor in an atmosphere of high culture.

Her schooling was better than average, although it ended when she was only sixteen years old. By considerable effort she was able to expand her education wonderfully. One of the most learned women of her time, she was competent in ancient and modern languages and highly skilled in philosophy. When, on her father's retirement, she moved to the city of Coventry, her intellectual abilities made her an intimate of scholars and men of letters.

Despite her shyness, her acquaintance among such people grew steadily. Intellectually, she was Maggie Tulliver written twice as big. She resembled Maggie in another important way: she was an ugly duckling, and she knew the feelings of a girl whom no one ever calls pretty. In Maggie's case, the duckling grew into a noble swan. Mary Ann Evans was physically ugly all her life; perhaps this is why she was somewhat preoccupied with the qualities of sincerity and loyalty in human relationships.

Another ugly duckling, the gifted and versatile writer, George Henry Lewes, was the love of her life. It was Lewes who diverted Mary Ann's talent from making learned translations to writing novels, and her very pen name acknowledged her debt to him: the first name, George, honored him, while the second name, Eliot, was a rough anagram - "to L. I Owe iT." ["to Lewis I Owe iT."] She produced, under the name of George Eliot, eight major long novels, a verse drama, and many poems and essays. Four of her novels, now largely forgotten, drew on her scholarship for their subject matter. The other four dealt with agricultural and middle-class life in rural England, and have a permanent place in literature.

For twenty-four years she and George Lewes lived together in various places in London and its outskirts. For various reasons they judged to be beyond their control, their union was frowned upon by many with whom they might have expected to associate as friends. The rejection hurt deeply, and the hurt helps explain George Eliot's never-wearying insistence in her novels that no one ought to be condemned by anyone who lacks full knowledge of the situation... The goodness of their long devotion to each other, however, was respected and admired by the Brownings, Lord Tennyson, and many others. Beyond all doubt, their life together was a happy one.

This happy existence, clouded as it was, ended with horrible abruptness shortly after she and Lewes bought a house near Godalming [God + alm + ing] with a view to living permanently out of town. Lewes, apparently in the best of health, suddenly died of a heart attack. Thus in November of 1878 the real life of George Eliot came to an end.

For several months she lived the life of a recluse, refusing to see even her closest friends. All her energies were devoted to preparing Lewes' unfinished writings for the press, and to setting up a university scholarship in his memory. In May of 1880 she shocked her friends by announcing her marriage to John Walter Cross, a New York banker who sincerely admired her talent but who was at least twenty years younger than she. Her friends loyally supported her decision, but they could not blind themselves to the central fact: her personality, although still substantially sane, had begun to operate in an erratic fashion - as if it had lost a balance wheel.

Less than a year later she died of pneumonia. [And then got revived? - G].

(From "THE MILL ON THE FLOSS" by George Eliot, in THE READER'S ENRICHMENT SERIES, each title in the series with a Reader's Supplement by a Board of Editors, Chairman Harry Shefter, Professor of English, New York University; published by Washington Square Press, Inc., New York.)

My speculations:

Was George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans revived by others and then she transformed herself, much like what happened to Jesus (reincarnation of Adam?): murdered by Satan's gang and then revived. Was Mary Ann Evans perhaps the reincarnation of Eve? Was George Henry Lewes the reincarnation of Adam? Interestingly, the name of My charming ex UIC M.S. math classmate - with whom I spoke only once, in class, for a few seconds when I asked for, and she gave Me, and at the end of class I returned to her, a pen - was probably Marian - Marian Esposito? - I am not sure. Also, was the UIUC masters in architecture student Cynthia Katherine Hammonds (whom I never met when I was a UIUC Ph.D. student though our rooms were on the same floor of the UIUC graduate dormitory) and UIC gal Marian (?) the same gal? - was the ignoble intention of Cynthia/Marian to spy on Me, like doublecrossing Eve? WAS Cynthia/Marian in fact the "reincarnation" of Eve/Margaret Elizabeth Noble/Sita and was she ordered by aliens to act as a honey trap to spy on Me at UIUC and afterwards at UIC? The George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans story reminds Me of "Virgin" Mary and Gabriel and John Wilkes Booth and Satan and Adam and Jesus and Margaret Elizabeth Noble alias Sister Nivedita and Swami Vivekananda and Thakur Ramkrishna and Rabindranath Thakur and Krishna and clones and sudden unexpected deaths of George Henry Lewes and the betrothed of Mary and the betrothed of Margaret Noble and repeated deaths of reincarnations of Adam and his repeated revival. I surmise after much reading and thinking and watching some films that the recently expired Satan strictly stipulated that Adam and Eve in their numerous reincarnations over billions of years might live together from time to time but could never have a formal marriage while Satan and his clones kept on hounding out and raping Eve in her numerous reincarnations over billions of years, Eve praying secretly and constantly over billions of years for the arrival of God on Earth to mercilessly destroy rapist Satan and his evil gang of aliens. She felt Satan was too much for mild-natured Adam/Jesus. Finally, thank God, God arrived and finished off Satan with the greatest of ease. (How do I know? - G).

I bought My copy of THE MILL ON THE FLOSS by George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans = Eve?] when I was a college student many years ago and so THE MILL ON THE FLOSS and other famous novels in THE READER'S ENRICHMENT SERIES published by Washington Square Press may be out of print, but there are Alibris and Better World Books - the world's most FANTASTIC sellers of second-hand books or used books that look like new and are sold by Alibris and Better World Books at low or affordable prices, for which My heartfelt thanks to Alibris and to Better World Books. Keep it up, My dear Alibris and Better World Books! May God bless you both!

Fantastic speculation: "George Eliot"/Mary Ann Evans = Eve = Mary = Margaret = Sita = "Shakespeare" = a ghost-writer for a VAST number of bestsellers purportedly written by male and female Indian and American and British novelists etc. etc.?

Kishalay Sinha [G]