In The Mill on the Floss George Eliot created her most passionate heroine - Maggie Tulliver. From childhood to fallen woman, the novel traces the history of its intelligent, vibrant and sensual heroine, showing ways in which she is both formed and yet thwarted and constrained by the small-minded provincial society in which she is reared. Through the detailed depiction of Maggie's childhood life and subsequent agonized relations with her beloved brother Tom, George Eliot offers an analysis of the conflicting demands and internalised contradictions experienced by middle-class women in Victorian culture. The main focus of Sally Shuttleworth's critical commentary rests on George Eliot's analysis of the social construction of gender in the novel, viewed in the light of her own ambivalent responses to the Victorian woman question. Shuttleworth unveils the imaginative wish-fulfilment which has fuelled much of the previous criticism of the novel, and points to the ways in which, both thematically and structurally, The Mill on the Floss challenges the implicit assumptions of realism upon which these criticisms have been based. This book should be of interest to students of English literature at all levels.