by Tina Mead

Created on: April 04, 2008

"Silly Novels" versus "Eliot's Novel":
Eliot's Complaints Held Against The Mill on the Floss

In 1854, George Eliot published an essay called, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," satirizing and essentially poking fun at many novels of her day. She is scathing in her reviews and unrelenting in her convictions. Six years after this essay, she published The Mill on the Floss, the story of young Maggie Tulliver and her life of troubles. But did she fall into the same stereotypes in her own work that she so contemptuously ridiculed in others'?

Eliot notes that in so many novels, Compensation by Henrietta Lascelles (Lady Chatterton) as an example, children do not talk like children. She quotes the child in this "silly novel" as saying, "[it] is more beautiful still from the dark cloud that has gone over it, when the sun suddenly lights up all the colours of the forests and shining purple rocks, and it is all reflected in the waters below" (Silly Novels, 93) Certainly, as Eliot observes with disdain, this is not the way any four and a half year old child would talk. When her novel begins, Maggie is nine. And, she speaks like a nine year old. "I know the reading in this book isn't prettybut I like the pictures, and I make stories to the pictures out of my own head, you know. But I've got sop's Fables' and a book about Kangaroos and things, and the Pilgrim's Progress'" (Mill, 63). Eliot, unlike Lascelles, leaves out the complex metaphors and descriptions that elevate the first selection far above any child's head, even a smart nine year old like Maggie.

Eliot next complains of a novel type that she calls the "oracular speciesnovels intended to expound the writer's religious, philosophical, or moral theories" (Silly Novels, 99). She uses for example The Enigma: A Leaf from the Chronicles of Wolchorley House, which tries to solve the stated problem, "All life is an inextricable confusion" (Silly Novels, 101). If Eliot is trying to teach a lesson or answer a philosophical question, she is subtle enough in her writing to leave it undetectable. We simply read of a young girl, whom we as readers greatly admire, that wants so many things common to all but, because of the injustices of life, cannot have them. Any message is well-disguised and certainly does not get in the way of the story.

Eliot also scoffs at the flowery language used by some women writers to describe simple things; for example: "Commonplace people would say that a copy of Shakespeare lay on a drawing-room table;

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