Maggie Tulliver is an intelligent, impetuous little girl who lives in the Mill of the title.  She plagues her mother with her unwillingness to behave in a neat, respectable way; she adores her straightforward but proud and litigious father; and she worships her older brother Tom, living for the times when he comes home from school.  As she grows up, the Tulliver’s fall on hard times and she is forced into more subdued behaviour, although her passionate nature and readiness to love remain simmering beneath the surface.  Slow and forthright Tom finds his place in his sister’s affections challenged by other men and Maggie faces difficult decisions.

Instead of focussing on romance as I expected, The Mill on the Floss is a book which explores relationships of all different kinds.  It examines the ties that bind an extended family network of aunts, uncles and cousins together through thick and thin, so that the relatives who scold and tut and say “I told you so” can nonetheless always be relied upon to provide support and lend a helping hand where necessary.  There are people drawn together out of pity, duty, friendship and tolerance.  The romantic relationships depicted in the book vary widely in their nature, their causes and their means of expression; some arise out of kindness and mutual loneliness rather than love, while others are due to restlessness and adventure.  Some relationships are easy and others are difficult and these are not always the ones that the reader might expect.  And of course, there is never any doubt that the two most important men in Maggie’s life are her brother Tom and her father Mr Tulliver.

Maggie herself is a fascinating character.  As a quick-witted, volatile little girl of violent passions she is utterly believeable.  Her emotionally charged decisions to cut off her hair or to run away with the gypsies are shown as being perfectly logical through Maggie’s childliek reasoning, though her repentence following these irrevocable decisions is swift and easily anticipated by the reader.  Her growth into a quieter, more mature and subdued figure is equally believeable, although it is not a little disappointing to see her spirit being crushed by circumstances.  She is not the sort of character that is always likeable, but she is constantly fascinating and the reader genuinely wants her to find happiness.

The best aspect of the book, for me, was George Eliot’s prose which is always insightful and heartfelt.  For example, when she talks about Tom returning home from a term away at school:

But it was worth purchasing, even at the heavy price of the Latin Grammar — the happiness of seeing the bright light in the parlour at home, as the gig passed noiselessly over the snow-covered bridge: the happiness of passing from the cold air into the warmth and the kisses and smiles of that familiar hearth, where the pattern of the rug and the grate and the fire-irons were ‘first ideas’ that it was no more possible to criticize than the solidity and extension of matter.  There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects become dear to us before we had known the labour of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality: we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs.  Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute — or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute?  But Heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affection had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things — if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory.

Unfortunately, just as I keep reading books I don’t enjoy in the hope that they will improve, so a book can deteriorate as it progresses, and I found myself loving The Mill on the Floss right up until the ending, which I loathed.  I’m desperately trying not to give anything away, but it is overly sentimental and completely out of keeping with the rest of the novel up to  that point both in content and tone.  I really wish that it had ended differently, but I remain pleased to have finally made it to the end of this book.

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.  Published by Fontana, 1979, pp. 507.  Originally published in 1860.

Title:

Author: Louisa May Alcott

Published: Honor Books, 1999, pp. 122.  Originally published 1870s

Genre: Children’s short stories

Blurb: “If someone would only come and take me away!  I’m so tired of living here I don’t think I can bear it much longer,” Patty cries.  Patty’s life in an orphanage is a dark world with little hope, beauty or love.  Even after a family finally does come for Patty, it is only because they need a servant.  But there is one person who does care about Patty.  And soon Patty’s life will never be the same!

When, where and why: I have to confess, I actually bought this for someone else as a Christmas gift.  I don’t usually read books before I give them to people (in fact, I never have before) but then my train home was delayed and I finished my other book and so I had nothing to read!  I was in a state of panic until I remembered that I had this book snuggled safely in a padded envelope in the depths of my bag, heading home to be wrapped.  Desperate times call for desperate measures and so I gave in to necessity and read the book.

What I thought: I firmly believe that any book is better than no book, and that if I were to be marooned on a desert island with nothing to read but a stack of Christine Feehan’s terrible vampire books I would plough gamely through them rather than sit around without a book.  Of course, I wouldn’t be able to hold anything resembling an intelligent conversation with normal people if I were ever rescued (although I would have an impressive collection of euphemisms for genitalia), but that’s besides the point.  Nevertheless, while The Quiet Little Woman, a book of three festive short stories by Louisa May Alcott, filled a bored half hour while stuck in a siding somewhere around Basingstoke, it swiftly transpired that I found it only marginally better than having no book at all, disappointingly.

Anyone approaching this book expecting to read something like Louisa May Alcott’s far more famous Little Women is likely to be equally disappointed, I’m afraid.  I found Little Women to be charming and hearwarming yet, although The Quiet Little Woman and Tilly’s Christmas (the first two stories in the collection) follow a similar narrative trajectory of poor but worthy girls finding love, warmth and happiness through their own selfless actions, they never achieved this end and so came across as rather sanctimonious.  I think this is partly because the stories are too short to allow much character development; the March girls may be good at heart but they all have faults which make them interesting, whereas Tilly and Patty are never anything other than perfect and boring.

Rosa’s Tale is a better story, as it deals with a horse rather than a painfully good child and so the rather hamfisted moral message which so irritated me in the first two stories is thankfully absent.  However, it reads like a paraphrase of Black Beauty rather than an original story and feels rushed.  Having read this book, I don’t think that the short story is Alcott’s medium, or at least it is not one which translates very well for a modern reader with modern expections.  On the whole, I found the collection to be sweet to the point of being sickly and moralistic to the point of being trite.

Where this book goes: This book is winging its way to the person for whom I bought it.  I really hope that they like it more than I did.

Tea talk: As this was a train book, there was no tea to be had.

Title:

Author: Wilkie Collins

Published: Penguin,1974, pp. 648

Genre: Classic mystery fiction

Blurb: Wilkie Collins’ sixth novel took the fashionable world by storm on its appearance in 1860 when everything from dances to dresses was named after the ‘woman in white’.  Its continuing power to fascinate stems in part from a distinctive blend of melodrama, comedy and realism; and in part from the power of its story.  Yet The Woman in White is more than just a classic thriller, and contemporary critics have found in it a feminist parable for our times.

When, where and why: I have no recollection whatsoever of buying this book, so I’m going to assume it’s been hanging around on my shelves for quite some time.  I picked it up to read now because there’s something about the colder weather which makes me want to read classic literature, and this one looked interesting.  It’s also book 23/50 for my Books Off the Shelf Challenge, and counts as 3/4 of my books towards the R.I.P. Challenge.

What I thought: After finishing this book I feel compelled to impersonate Mrs Bennet by throwing my hands into the air and exclaiming, “Oh, Mr Collins!”  I really enjoyed this book and, like so many authors I’ve discovered this year, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to find out how good he is.  I have vague memories of reading The Moonstone when I was eleven (which I’ll now have to go back and reread) but I can’t remember enjoying it anything like as much as The Woman in White, probably because I was too young to appreciate it properly.

I found The Woman in White to be a very skilfully written work as it is presented from so many different perspectives.  The story is set up as evidence for the mystery of the eponymous woman in white, and so it is necessary for a string of characters to take charge of the narrative as the story progresses in order for the reader to be presented with a first hand view of important events.  Impressively, each character has a different and appropriate narrative style, with just the voice and preoccupations I would have imagined for them: Walter Hartright is romantic, emotional, and prone to waxing lyrical about things; Miss Halcombe is precise and detailed; the lawyer is sparse and abrupt.  I thought that the use of these different voices adds texture to the novel and helps to create suspense, as the individual characters reveal their information separately for the reader to piece together.

In Marian Halcombe, Collins has created a great female character.  She is resourceful, intelligent and strong-willed while still being constrained by her position in Victorian society.  She’s the sort of character I was was real because if she was, I’d want to have her round for tea and be her friend.  Had I been Walter Hartright, I would have fallen in love with Marian instead of Laura Fairlie (I notice that Collins is careful to state how ugly Marian is when she is introduced, which I assume is an attempt to explain this preference).  Where Marian seems real and lively, Laura Fairlie is a typical, insipid woman-written-by-Victorian-man; it works well in the context of the story, but I wish she’d been a bit more interesting.  Like Marain, Count Fosco is also a brilliant creation, but to say more would give too much away.

The story itself is engrossing.  Perhaps it’s due to my not reading many mysteries, but I found myself falling for every trap and red herring that Collins wove into the narrative.  This certainly didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the story; in fact, I found myself relishing being led around by Collins while convinced (incorrectly) that I had figured out the solution to the mystery.  I liked the slow, drawn out pace with which the narrative progressed (presumably partly due to its original publication in serial) and thought that it added to the suspense, as I had to wait until Collins was good and ready to reveal what happened next.

My only criticism of this novel is the way in which Collins solved the mystery.  It wasn’t the conclusion that I objected to at all, but the bizarre way in which Walter Hartright eventually uncovered it, completely unconnected to anything else in the text so far.  I couldn’t have been more flummoxed if a talking unicorn had suddenly popped up and solved everything for him.  While this seemingly strange addition was probably an enjoyable twist for Collins’ contemporary readers who enjoyed sensational literature, I found it out of character with the rest of the book and I wish the mystery had been concluded in a less surprising way more in keeping with the narrative so far.  However, I understand that I’m looking at this as a modern reader and so with different priorities.  Nonetheless, this didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the novel and I can’t wait to read more by this author.

Where this book goes: The old Penguin copy I read was quite tatty before I began and had fallen apart by the time I finished reading it.  However, I enjoyed the book far too much not to have a copy of it to keep around and so ordered a more durable looking hardback Everyman edition from Amazon Marketplace.

Tea talk: Until recently when I managed to guilt someone into sorting it out by subtly walking past the facilities manager wearing my coat, scarf and hat, there’s been no heating in my office at all.  Consequently, I’ve been drinking Lapsang Souchong in an attempt to make myself feel warmer.  I’ve decided this is the perfect winter tea, because it smells like sitting in front of an open fire.  Expect many more tea notes waxing lyrical about this smokey tea.