As Maggie Tulliver approaches adulthood, her spirited temperament brings her into conflict with her family, her community, and her much-loved brother Tom. Still more painfully, she finds her own nature divided between the claims of moral responsibility and her passionate hunger for self-fulfillment. This edition of The Mill on the Floss offers the definitive Clarendon text with a new Introduction which deals with Eliot, Darwinism, and the intellecutal life of the period, as well as providing close textual analysis.