After the success of her first full-length novel,
Adam Bede, George Eliot quickly set to work on the writing of a second novel, encouraged both by her husband-agent, George Henry Lewes, and her publisher, John Blackwood. Curiously, she knew that the story would end tragically in a cataclysmic flood before she even knew what the details of that story would be. In January 1859 she researched the flood-history of the River Dove, near her childhood home in Wawickshire, but it was clearly not floody enough. Rivers in Weymouth and Dorchester failed to inspire her a few months later, and finally it was the Trent River at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire that provided her with the requisite images for the fictional village of St. Ogg's on the Floss River. After some astute bargaining Lewes fixed a…
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Citation: Uglow, Nathan. "The Mill on the Floss". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 June 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=167, accessed 26 November 2024.]
