The Mill on the Floss

Reading The Mill on the Floss was a really peculiar experience for several reasons. The first was that I genuinely knew nothing about the story- except that I had a vague inkling that it was very gloomy, which is what had put me off for so long. In fact the first half of the book is not gloomy at all, it's all innocent childhood adventures and- dare I say it- it's even funny. Then, just when I was thinking I'd got it all so wrong, Eliot just hits you with this complete tragedy. Reading it in this way made the whole thing more real for me, I really lived this book alongside Maggie and it made me realise how often one knows what's coming in a book whether or not you've been told about it beforehand. Although there is an underlying strain of sadness through the novel I found, in my ignorance, that it didn't overwhelm the lighter sections, only cast them in that slightly melancholy rose-tinted glow of remembering simpler times.
One of the lovely things about doing my PhD is the way it has me reading. I read this with a view to using it in my thesis and I could feel my brain working hard to contextualise the text, to somehow situate it in amongst the other research I was doing, but as it all unfolded in front of me that part of my brain took a back seat and although it was still there, ticking over somewhere, I just sat and read, and read, and read, completely involved in a story being expertly told. It is something that people have often asked me over the last few years, whether studying literature makes reading seem like work, whether it turns it into a chore, or homework. The truth is that it makes it better. Nobody would suggest that the more you know about art the less you would enjoy looking at a painting, and it is just the same. I appreciate the skill in a  novel like The Mill on the Floss more, I know something of who wrote it and the time she was writing in. I have scarcely scratched the surface of what there is to know but I know more than I did six years ago, in fact I know more than I did six days ago and doing such a large research project means constantly learning, absorbing, changing. Studying literature is my passion for many reasons but the simplest and most true of all is just this, that I love to read.