The Woman Question / The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Abstract

Two features of the early fiction of Marian Evans have been hitherto unmentioned: the employment of a male pseudonym, and the masculine self-references of the narrator. There are several examples of the latter in Scenes of Clerical Life: ‘Let me discover that the lovely Phoebe thinks my squint intolerable’, we hear on one occasion, ‘and I shall never be able to fix her blandly with my disengaged eye again’; and in another place, the narrator recalls that ‘he’ had once blushed when he thought he was being laughed at ‘because I was appearing in coat-tails for the first time’ (Amos Barton, ch. 2; Janet’s Repentance, ch. 2). After The Mill on the Floss, the gender-specific references stopped, and in time it became well-known that the author of the George Eliot novels was a woman. But most readers and reviewers of the Scenes and Adam Bede were not as perceptive as Dickens, who immediately guessed from internal evidence that their author was a woman.

What was it, he wondered, that made Maggie’s dark eyes remind him of the the stories about princesses being turned into animals?.… I think it was that her eyes were full of unsatisfied intelligence, and unsatisfied, beseeching affection.

The Mill on the Floss