George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, a prominent Victorian novelist. The author of Silas Marner and Middlemarch among others, her works have become classics of English literature. She is noted for her realism and acute psychological insight. The Mill on the Floss deals with the relationship Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a brother and sister growing up on the Floss river near St. Ogg. The book covers a fifteen-year period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the first Reform Bill, from their childhood till their deaths.
Maggie is the focus, an intelligent young woman who yearns for the love her father provided before his death, and desires experience of the wider world she cannot get in her remote location. Her desires clash with those of her more pragmatic brother as they experience various trials including the death of their father, bankruptcy, and the loss of the mill.