Abstract
The Mill on the Floss is unlikely to seem as obvious a choice as the other three fictions I have selected for the present study. In this chapter I shall try to clarify, at the cost of some simplification, what I take to be the most radical purpose in the novel, that is the search for some ultimate meaning for human life in a world which in the author’s view has no transcendent Purpose. In a famous letter to Dr Payne, written in 1876, she claims explicitly that this was a general intention in her fiction: ‘my writing is simply a set of experiments in life — an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of — what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we may strive — what gains from past revelations and discipline we must strive to keep hold of as something more sure than shifting theory. I become more and more timid — with less daring to adopt any formula which does not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience, and perhaps that is a sign that if I help others to see at all it must be through that medium of art’.1 In chapter 10 I shall discuss those aspects of the book which are most clearly highlighted by thinking of it in unaccustomed relation to Utopia and Rasselas; and in the following two chapters I shall pursue some of the underlying questions of form and of philosophy raised by this kind of fiction and by my account of it.
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Notes
The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (1954–6), Vol. 6 pp. 216–17.
Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (1963), p. 379.
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© 1985 Peter New
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New, P. (1985). The Mill on the Floss: Purpose without Purpose. In: Fiction and Purpose in Utopia, Rasselas, The Mill on the Floss and Women in Love. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_9
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