ABSTRACT
This chapter offers the complementary activities of reading and writing in George Eliot's case by the author's references to French women's literature of the classical and Romantic periods, and by Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical account of reading Eliot. The Mill on the Floss can be read as the first volume of Eliot's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman', which depicts literature as a collaborative activity between reader and writer. Eliot gives three reasons why French women writers succeeded in finding a voice of their own and making it heard, beginning with the physiological, and even the phrenological, characteristics of the Gallic race. Eliot sets Tom the lesson on the 'Rules for the Genders of Nouns', starting with nouns where there is an apparent discrepancy between their gender and their endings. Eliot borrows the title of the fourth book of The Mill on the Floss – 'The Valley of Humiliation' – from John Bunyan.
