George Eliot was born on 22 November, 1819. She was born Mary Ann Evans. It was in 1857 that she adopted her nom de plume George Eliot. George was the Christian name of her husband (George Henry Lewes). She declared that she chose the name because “George was Mr. Lewes's Christian name, and Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word". Her novel ‘The Mill on the Floss’ was not able to repeat the success of its predecessor ‘Adam Bede’. And there were reasons attached to it. The Maggie-Stephanie affair had violated the ethical and moral norms of the Victorian age.
Autobiographical Elements:
F.R. Leavis is the most prominent among the modern critics who gives weightage to the autobiographical element in the novel. He mentions the existence of an ‘emotional tone’ in those episodes of the novel that have autobiographical lineage. On the one hand he sees the positive point of the novel in tis psychological realism while on the other hand, he is critical of the inadequate climax – the dramatic occurrence of floods and Maggie’s drowning with Tom.
As far as the autobiographical elements are concerned – Dorcocte Mill has its strings attached to Eliot’s memories of Arbury Mill. Dorlocte Mill is on the Trent near Gainsborough but as G.S. Haight says (in his introduction to the Riverside edition of ‘The Mill on the Floss’), it is drawn from the memories of Arbury Mill.
Leslie Stephen feels that she took herself to be the heroine. He writes in his essay ‘The “Beautiful Soul” and the Commonplace Environment in The Mill on the Floss’ that the attic to which Maggie retires in the mill is the attic to which George Eliot had retired in her father’s house.
Like her father Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf also finds too much subjectivity (or “self consciousness” as she calls it) in Eliot’s heroines – the reason why she dislikes them.
Inspite of its being considered a flawed work artistically and its earlier reception as a morally shocking work, the fact remains that ‘The Mill on the Floss’ was, is and will remain and important jewel in the crown of English literature.