Read by Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), Elizabeth Klett, daisy55, Annise, hugoceline, breathe, Lee Ann Howlett, Amanda Hindman, Elizabeth Harker, Janna · 58 chapters · 21 h 15
Tom and Maggie Tulliver grow up beside the River Floss, at their father’s mill in the English Midlands. Maggie is passionate, imaginative and impatient with the rules of the small town of St. Oggs. Tom is practical and steady, and quick to judge. Their closeness as children is deep, but as they grow older, family quarrels, money troubles and conflicting loyalties pull them in different directions. George Eliot follows them from the games of childhood through the pain of growing up, with a clear eye for the way ordinary people in a close community can be harsh or generous. The book is rich in detail, warmly humane and often moving. It is a long, absorbing novel, full of memorable characters and the changing moods of the river. It is a story that grows richer the longer you stay with it.
Introduction
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, born in 1819 and died in 1880. She chose a male name to ensure that her fiction would be taken seriously, and she became one of the great novelists of the Victorian age. Her books, including Adam Bede, Middlemarch and Silas Marner, are admired for their psychological insight and moral intelligence.
The Mill on the Floss was published in 1860, her second full-length novel, and it draws on her own memories of growing up in Warwickshire. The first volumes are devoted to childhood, which she describes with remarkable tenderness and truth. Later, the story widens to include the pressures of money, class and religion in a provincial town. The setting is the 1820s, after the Napoleonic Wars and before the first Reform Bill of 1832, and Eliot uses the period to show a society wrestling with change.
The LibriVox recording has fifty-eight sections, arranged in seven books, and runs for more than twenty-one hours. It is read by several volunteers. Listening to a novel of this size is a long journey, but the characters become companions, and the details of the countryside and its people unfold gradually. Readers who love the great Victorian novel will find it a deeply rewarding experience, full of feeling and thought.
The novel is also a portrait of a society, with its aunts and uncles, its dinners and quarrels, and its strict ideas of respectability. Eliot sees the comedy in these things as well as the pain, and her narrator often speaks directly to the reader, with sympathy and a gentle irony. Take your time, and the book will repay you generously.
Public domain
George Eliot died in 1880: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
