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"She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas-a-Kempis, and the 'Christian Year' (no longer rejected as a 'hymn-book') that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of her new faith to need any other material for her mind to work on, as she sat with her well-plied needle, making shirts and other complicated stitchings fasely called 'plain' - by no means plain to Maggie, since wristband and sleeve and the like had a capability of being sewed-in wrong side outwards in moments of mental wandering."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Author

The Mill on the Floss

Place of Publication

Edinburgh and London

Publisher

William Blackwood and Sons

Date

1860

Metaphor

"She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas-a-Kempis, and the 'Christian Year' (no longer rejected as a 'hymn-book') that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of her new faith to need any other material for her mind to work on, as she sat with her well-plied needle, making shirts and other complicated stitchings fasely called 'plain' - by no means plain to Maggie, since wristband and sleeve and the like had a capability of being sewed-in wrong side outwards in moments of mental wandering."

Metaphor in Context

The old books, Virgil, Euclid, and Aldrich - that wrinkled fruit of the tree of knowledge - had been all laid by, for Maggie had turned her back on the vain ambition to share the thoughts of the wise. In her first ardour, she flung away the books with a sort of triumph that she had risen above the need of them, and if they had been her own she would have burned them, believing that she would never repent. She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas-a-Kempis, [end page 305] and the 'Christian Year' (no longer rejected as a 'hymn-book') that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of her new faith to need any other material for her mind to work on, as she sat with her well-plied needle, making shirts and other complicated stitchings fasely called 'plain' - by no means plain to Maggie, since wristband and sleeve and the like had a capability of being sewed-in wrong side outwards in moments of mental wandering.
(pp. 305-6)