The Mill on the Floss

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Writer Rebecca Mead, actor Fiona Shaw + academics Dafydd Mills Daniel, Philip Davis & Peggy Reynolds read George Eliot's 1860 novel portraying sibling relationships. Shahidha Bari hosts.

George Eliot was born on 22 November 1819. Rebecca Mead is the author of The road to Middlemarch: my life with George Eliot. Dafydd Mills Daniel is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and AHRC to put academic research on the radio. Professor Peggy Reynolds teaches at Queen Mary University London and has edited anthologies of Victorian poets, the Sappho Companion and the Penguin edition of George Eliot's Adam Bede. Professor Philip Davis teaches at the University of Liverpool and is the author of The Transferred Life of George Eliot.

Listen out for Radio 3's weekly curation of Words and Music which broadcasts each Sunday at 5.30pm and is available to listen here https://bbc.in/2E72xV0 A special episode also featuring Fiona Shaw as one of the readers hears extracts from Eliot's fiction, essays and journal set alongside the music she might have had on her playlist - composers including Clara Schumann, Liszt, whom Eliot met in 1854; and Tchaikovsky, who said his favourite writer was George Eliot.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
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0:33.1	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:37.6	Hello, you. Yes, you with the inquiring mind and the artistic hair. Thank you for downloading this podcast.
0:45.5	We promise to keep you company as you trek the lonely path to work, laugh with you as you loll in the bath and whisper sweet somethings into your ear as you drift into sleep.
0:56.5	I'm Shahid Abari and I think you and the Arts and Ideas podcast from BBC Radio 3 are just meant to be together.
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1:44.0	If you'd like to hear more, just search for
1:46.2	the way I see it on BBC Sounds. Hello, writing to her editor in 1859, the novelist George
1:54.7	Elliot described the tentative beginnings of a new project. My story's grow in me like plants,
2:03.4	she reflected. This is only in the leaf bud.
2:10.3	I have faith that the flower will come. She was right. Published in 1861, the Mill on the Floss was greeted as a great success. With its tempestuous heroine Maggie, the Mill on the Floss is the novel that
2:15.9	cleaves closest to Elliot's own experience.
2:19.2	The book records the inner life of a young girl whose intellectual ambitions and romantic yearnings
2:24.5	are set against the expectations of a rural English town.
2:28.5	Here to help me discuss the novel are Philip Davis, the author of The Transferred Life of George
	...

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