Eliot, George (1819-1880)

The Mill on the Floss

Edinburgh and London

William Blackwood and Sons

1860

"And so the poor child, with her soul's hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin, geometry, and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a gleam of triumph now and then that her understanding was quite equal to these peculiarly masculine studies"

In one of these meditations, it occurred to her that she had forgotten Tom's school-books, which had been sent home in his trunk. But she found the stock unaccountably shrunk down to the few old ones [end page 298] which had been well thumbed - the Latin Dictionary and Grammar, a Delectus, a torn Eutropius, the well-worn Virgil, Aldrich's Logic, and the exasperating Euclid. Still, Latin, Euclid and Logic would surely be a considerable step in masculine wisdom - in that knowledge which made men contented and even glad to live. Not that the yearning for effectual wisdom was quite unmixed: a certain mirage would now and then rise on the desert of the future, in which she seemed to see herself honoured for her surprising attainments. And so the poor child, with her soul's hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin, geometry, and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a gleam of triumph now and then that her understanding was quite equal to these peculiarly masculine studies. For a week or two she went on resolutely enough, though with an occasional sinking of heart, as if she had set out toward the Promised Land alone, and found it a thirsty, trackless, uncertain journey. In the severity of her early resolution she would take Aldrich out into the fields, and then look off her book towards the sky where the lark was twinkling or to the reeds and bushes by the river where the water-fowl rustled out on her anxious, awkward flight - with a startled sense that the relation between Aldrich and this living world was extremely remote for her. The discouragement deepened as the days went on, and the eager heart gained faster and faster on the patient mind. Somehow, when she sat at the window with her book, her eyes would fix themselves blankly on the outdoor sunshine: then they would fill with tears, and sometimes, if her mother was not in the room, the studies would all end in sobbing. She rebelled against her lot, she fainted under its loneliness, and fits even of anger and hatred towards her father and mother who were so unlike what she would have them to be - towards Tom, who checked her and met her thought or feeling always by some thwarting difference - would flow out over her affections and conscience like a lava stream and frighten her with the sense that it was not difficult for her to become a demon. Then her brain would be busy with wild romances of a flight from home in search of something less [end page 299] sordid and dreary: - she would go to some great man - Walter Scott, perhaps, and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he would surely do something for her. But in the middle of her vision her father would perhaps enter the room for the evening, and, surprised that she sat still, without noticing him, would say complainingly, 'Come, am I to fetch my slippers myself?' The voice pierced through Maggie like a sword: there was another sadness besides her own, and she had been thinking of turning her back on it and forsaking it. (pp. 298-300)

Body::Eating and Drinking

See The Mill on the Floss (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1860). <Vol. I in Google Books><Vol. II><Vol. III>

06/21/2007