SOURCE: "The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 2, September, 1975, pp. 150-71.

In the following essay, Auerbach analyzes The Mill on the Floss as a Gothic romance, noting that it is a novel of sensation rather than naturalism.

We do not expect to meet vampires and demons on the flat plains of George Eliot's St. Ogg's, or to find witches spying on the regular rotations of the mill on the Floss. George Eliot's insistence on a moral apprehension of the real seems to banish all such strange shapes from her landscape.

But the stolid world of The Mill on the Floss is more receptive to the uncanny than its surface appears to be. The novel is often condemned for a loss of moral balance arising from George Eliot's overidentification with her heroine, Maggie Tulliver. It is true that Maggie's pull on the novel...