![]() ![]() First and foremost, this is a novel about human action caught in the mills of social convention and swept up by the larger movements of nature, with an actual river, the Floss, at its centre. ![]() In doing so she also announces a central theme of the work, the relationship between determinism and free will, though it is only through the intricacies of plot and the exploration of human relationships, the business of human life itself, that its philosophical complexities emerge. Eliot thus announces the fatal ending of the key relationship in this novel before we ever begin reading. My title’s not giving anything away: that quotation forms the epigraph of The Mill on the Floss, and it is also the novel’s final sentence. The Mill on the Floss ‘In their death they were not divided’: Sally Minogue takes a look at ‘The Mill on the Floss’ in the bicentenary year of George Eliot’s birth. ![]()
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