The Mill on the Floss

Chapter 1
Outside Dorlcote Mill

A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. On this mighty tide the black ships laden with the fresh-scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal are borne along to the town of St. Ogg s, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river brink, tinging the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun. Far away on each hand stretch the rich pastures, and the patches of dark earth, made ready for the seed of broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with the tint of the tender-bladed autumn-sown corn. There is a remnant still of the last year s golden clusters of beehive ricks rising at intervals beyond the hedgerows; and everywhere the hedgerows are studded with trees: the distant ships seem to be lifting their masts and stretching their red-brown sails close among the branches of the spreading ash. Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss. How lovely the little river is, with its dark, changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank and listen to its low placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving. I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge.

And this is Dorlcote Mill. I must stand a minute or two here on the bridge and look at it, though the clouds are threatening, and it is far on in the afternoon. Even in this leafless time of departing February it is pleasant to look at perhaps the chill damp season adds a charm to the trimly-kept, comfortable dwelling-house, as old as the elms and chestnuts that shelter it from the northern blast. The stream is brimful now, and lies high in this little withy plantation, and half drowns

A. S. Byatt was born in 1936 and educated in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge, of which she is now an Honorary Fellow. She taught English at University College, London, from 1972 to 183. She appears regularly on radio and television, and writes academic articles and literary journalism both in England and abroad. Her fiction includes The Shadow of the Sun; The Game; The Virgin in the Garden; Still Life; Sugar and Other Stories; Possession, winner of the 1990 Booker Prize and the 1990 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction prize; the novella Angels and Insects; The Matisse Stories; The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, a collection of fairy stories; Babel Tower; Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice; The Biographers Tale; A Whistling Woman and The Little Black Book of Stories. Her work has been translated into 28 languages. Her critical work includes Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Unruly Times (on Wordsworth and Coleridge) and, with the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré, Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers. Passions of the Mind, a collection of critical essays, appeared in 1991; a new collection, On Histories and Stories, appeared in 2000; Portraits in Fiction, a study of the relationship between painting and the novel, and (ed.) Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, by George Eliot, in 2001. She was appointed DBE in 1999.

"As one comes back to [Eliot's] books after years of absence they pour out, even against our expectations, the same store of energy and heat, so that we want more than anything to idle in the warmth."
--Virginia Woolf