Christian: Do you even read, bro? APRIL READS
Contemplating shapely table legs, sexy Victorians, and the novelty of women being allowed to have their own thoughts
Surely every literature blog recommending reads in April is obliged to pontificate about whether April is, indeed, the cruellest month. Welp, I like April, so T. S. Eliot can Do One. Due to general laziness and poor planning on my part, I’m only recommending two reads this month—although be assured that I have gone on, at tedious length, about both. I am nothing if not consistent.
Enjoy!
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot (1860)
TL;DR summary:
Who should read?: Tomboys, misfits, and girls debating cutting off their hair in a fit of passion. I promise you: you will regret it.
Key quote: “Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.”
Difficulty rating: 7/10 (George Eliot does go on a bit)
The Mill on the Floss is about a bygone era, about the passing of time, the redundancy of old ways of living, and the inevitable brutal march of tech. In a funny kind of way, English industrial towns in the 1820s (the period when the novel is set) were full of all the same anxieties as today—except, instead of ChatGPT sidling in to take your job, it was the cotton jenny. Or the printing press. Or factories. One minute you’d be happily working away in your farm or smallholding in some picturesque country location, the next you’d be queuing for a rubbish industrial job in the Big Smoke, forced from your Eden into the new urban sprawl.
The actual setting of The Mill on the Floss is the Tulliver family home, which happens to be a mill powered by a river (the Floss), situated in beautiful Warwickshire countryside. Eliot opens her novel with a lengthy description of the structure and the surrounding countryside, describing the mill as ‘booming’ and emitting a ‘grey curtain of sound, shutting one out from the world beyond’. It is as if she is communicating to the reader, up front, that the world of her novels is a world in flux—a place that used to be all trees, flowers, and pretty birdies, but is fast becoming production, and smog, and peak grindset.
Sounds boring, right? Well, it’s really, really not. In fact, I am convinced, and have yet to be persuaded otherwise, that The Mill on the Floss contains the sexiest scene you will find in any Victorian novel out there—and I’ve read a fair few, my friends. That’s not why you should read it of course, it’s just an accolade that I feel it doesn’t often get recognised for and has, absolutely, earned.
But let’s backpedal for a second, as I’ve got some explaining to do before I am confident that I can convince you of this (frankly indisputable) fact.
There’s a myth doing the rounds that the Victorians would cover table legs up for fear that their glossy shapeliness might lead the minds of respectable gentlemen astray. While this little tidbit is entirely unfounded, it’s nonetheless interesting that we modern peeps are inclined to accept it wholesale. It says a lot about what we think about this era of history. If you were to ask anyone what they think of the Victorians, you can bet that the words ‘prudish’, ‘uptight’, or ‘killjoy’ might feature—in fact, when searching for synonyms for ‘prudish’, one of the results was ‘Victorian’.1 So, if the Victorians were so prudish, how could The Mill on the Floss be so ruddy steamy?
This is where the world-in-flux and creeping tech theme and Victorian agonising restraint combine and morph into an impressively romantic combination. Like the times she lives in, Maggie, our heroine, is a turbulent young woman, stuck between loyalty to her family and the mill (and her peculiarly controlling brother, Tom), and the possibility of a few different sliding-doors futures with two different suitors: the studious Philip Wakem, and love-rat badboy Stephen Guest. Throughout the novel, Eliot highlights how both guys notice Maggie’s eyes, with Phil describing them as being ‘full of unsatisfied, beseeching affection’ and Steve noting how they contained ‘delicious opposites’. So, we have a conflicted heroine, whose passions and desires are being bottled up inside to the extent that her feelings are literally pouring out of her eyeballs. The booming mill claims Maggie’s attention on one side, and the furious passion of these two guys clamour for her fidelity on the other side. Industry meets romance. Duty clashes with desire. What’s a girl to do?
Of these two beaus, it’s really Stephen that catches Maggie’s attention—at least romantically. Philip is smart and interesting and wholesome, and Maggie likes him a lot, sure, but when Stephen turns up in the final third of the novel, Maggie is rather distracted. Which is unfortunate, because Stephen is engaged to her lovely, if slightly dopey, cousin Lucy. In his most scandalous inner thoughts, Stephen describes Maggie as a ‘tall dark-eyed nymph’, and cooks up a plan to take both girls out boating, just so he can take her hand a few times and ‘advantageously situate [himself] when he is rowing them in a boat’. What an uber-cad.
And this is where Victorian reserve meets stormy emotions in a wonderfully steamy kettle of ambivalent passion. At a party, Stephen finds a way into Maggie’s orbit, stealing her away for the kind of ‘walk’ that is clearly concealing ulterior motives (well played, Steve, well played). In a moment pregnant with euphemistic undertones, the two enter a conservatory filled with flowers and, as Maggie reaches for a rose, Stephen showers kisses on her outstretched arm.
Surely a few inappropriate arm kisses can’t have earned this scene such sexy notoriety, right? Well, Maggie doesn’t think so. The seriousness of the act is evidenced in her reaction—she is deeply distraught about it. She rebukes Stephen fiercely, and then ‘[throws] herself on the sofa, panting and trembling’. And, weirdly, when reading this scene, this doesn’t seem like an overreaction. The way Eliot builds up the tension between these two—the lingering stares, the emphasis on Stephen’s engagement, the internal wrestling whereby Stephen is left ‘dizzy with the conflict of passions’—and then places them in an aggressively romantic indoor rose garden is so intensely evocative, The Arm Kisses take on a new weight. The thing is, in a time where people could conceivably have had an objection to the flirty curve of a table leg, an arm kiss feels basically tantamount to some serious between-the-sheets action.
Whether or not you’re entirely convinced by my (semi-serious) argument that The Mill on the Floss is a hot-under-the-collar masterpiece, there is far more to it than just a girl being pursued by a bunch of guys. Like all Eliot’s novels, this one is highly sophisticated and psychologically complex, and paints a vivid picture of a time in history that is so often mischaracterised and written off a dull and dusty. However, whether you read this novel or not, please be sure to give any current film adaptations a wide berth.
Seriously.
A Room with a View, E. M. Forster (1908)
TL;DR summary
Who should read?: Anyone who still believes in soul-mates.
Key quote: “Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”
Difficulty rating: 2/10 (super easy, super short, and a lorra lorra laughs)
"I have a theory that there is something in the Italian landscape which inclines even the most stolid nature to romance."
If you know anything about this novel, it’s probably apropos of the 1985 Merchant Ivory adaptation, where Helena Bonham Carter is passionately wooed by Julian Sands in a Florentine poppy field. You might expect me to dismiss this film as contemptible fluff and tell you to redeem yourself immediately by reading the text, you lazy, slack-jawed, TV-addled fool—but you’d be wrong. The Merchant Ivory adaptation is so close to the text itself that there’s barely any point in both reading and watching it. Having said that, the faint of heart may need to prepare themselves for a surprisingly strong dose of the male form halfway through the film. But it’s art, and so it’s definitely not gratuitous. Probably.
So, what’s A Room with a View about, then? I think it’s about the importance of telling the truth. It’s about the importance of indelicacy, impoliteness, and impertinence. It’s about transparency. In short, it’s about true love.
Because of course it is. Any novel opening in Italy has got to be about true love. But true love according to Forster has a different quality, and in this novel he place the emphasis on the ‘true’. True love in his world is real, earthy, and without pretension. In a funny way, the ridiculous lady-novelist, Eleanor Lavish, hits the nail on the head while prancing around the streets of Florence with our young protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, when they discuss the smell of the city:
“A smell! A true Florentine smell! Every city, let me teach you, has its own smell.”
“Is it a very nice smell?”
“One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness—one comes for life.”
Now, while Eleanor is an ostentatious old nutter not to be taken too seriously, here she is actually conveying something quite profound (albeit, in an unbearably pretentious way), and highlighting a theme that will run through the whole novel—that it’s not ‘niceness’ that matters, but reality, truth, or, as she puts it, ‘life’. It is in Italy that Lucy experiences, likely for the first time, something close to ‘true love’, when she meets the intensely alive George Emerson, who, when overcome with poppy-induced passion, sneaks a snog with her. Cue sweeping Puccini background theme.
No matter how compelling such a moment ought to be, however, Lucy isn’t quite ready for this level of truth. When back in jolly old Blighty, we learn, quickly, that she usually inhabits a more, shall I say, deluded space when it comes to her romantic dalliances. So, in order to get to true love, we must meet and defeat the final boss of passionless relations: Cecil Vyse.
Cecil is absolutely unbearable—although Daniel Day Lewis’s superbly cringe-inducing and oddly touching interpretation of the character is one of the best things about the Merchant Ivory film. He is the anti-romantic hero, the bungling Mr Collins of the piece. Towards the start of the novel, we learn that Lucy is engaged to him, and when observing, immediately, how obviously, comically wrong he is for her, we can’t help but assume that she is subject to a monstrous level of self-deception. Which, of course, she is. Cecil is an unbearable snob. He looks down on all Lucy’s relations and neighbours, quotes Italian proverbs, and laughs at Lucy’s ‘feminine inconsequence’. He calls Lucy a ‘Leonardo’, as if she were an inanimate piece of art rather than a human woman, and, when he goes in for a pash, he first uses the word ‘hitherto’, and then his pince-nez goes all askew. Stick that kiss in the nah-box, I think.
After this disaster of a kiss, Cecil reflects on the unmitigated cringe of it all, and considers:
Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. […] Why could he not do as any labourer or navvy—nay, as any young man behind the counter would have done?
Why indeed? The anti-romantic hero, in Forster’s eyes, then, is the one that cannot get past agonising self-consciousness and act upon true feelings—held back, perhaps, by a sense that true love is at odds with refinement. Or that true love is beneath the civilised.
Enter: lovely George. While Cecil regards Lucy as something to be looked at, something inanimate that would decorate his spindly arm nicely, George sees Lucy as an individual with her own thoughts and feelings—and he perceives the danger of Cecil’s objectifying view of her. In fact, George warns her, passionately, against marrying Cecil, explaining:
He's the sort who can't know anyone intimately, least of all a woman. He doesn't know what a woman is. He wants you for a possession, something to look at, like a painting or an ivory box. Something to own and to display. He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
NB: Fellas. If you want to woo a girl successfully, write that one down. Immediately.
To be fair, at times George does come off as a little, erm, inappropriate. After all, at one point he steals a kiss with Lucy while her fiancé is only a few yards away. But then, as the Miss Allens put it to Lucy at the start of the novel, when George’s father decorates their room with blue cornflowers:
“Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time — beautiful?”
So I think we can let him off.
I guess I need to decide whether I'm a tomboy, a misfit, a girl debating cutting off their hair in a fit of passion, or I still believe in soulmates! This might be the hardest question I've faced all day.