She followed the success of her first book, Scenes From Clerical Life (1858) with two novels—Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) in rapid succession. Altogether George Eliot published seven novels as well as short stories, essays, and poetry. The Mill on the Floss remained her most autobiographical and most tragic novel—the freedoms that Marian Evans was beginning to enjoy as a writer in mid-Victorian England would be forever denied her heroine, a woman oppressed by the narrowness of her family and the provincial community of her pre-Victorian childhood.
Catholic emancipation. The Mill on the Floss opens in 1829, at the time of the great debates over Catholic emancipation. Three centuries earlier, at the time of the Reformation, the birth of Protestantism led, in turn, to the birth of the Church of England and consequent changes in English politics, which restricted voting and posts in Parliament to Anglicans, members of the Church of England, or Anglican Church. Since 80 percent of the Irish population belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, the Irish were effectively disenfranchised by this legislation.
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