Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: This paper aims to make a profound analysis of the feminism of George Eliot in her novel The Mill on the Floss in three aspects: education, love and marriage, and occupation. The paper holds the viewpoint that George Eliot encourages women to fight for the rights to receive good education, to love freely, to take an occupation they like. The paper also shows that George Eliot’s feminism is complicated, realistic, ambivalent, even compromised.

Key words: George Eliot; The Mill on the Floss; Feminism

摘要：本文旨在对乔治.艾略特的小说《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》中的女性主义进行深入剖析，具体分三个方面：教育、爱情和婚姻、职业。同时本文认为乔治.艾略特鼓励妇女去争取受教育权,恋爱自由权和就业权等。本文通过分析表明乔治.艾略特的女性主义观是复杂的，现实的，矛盾的，甚至是妥协的。

关键词：乔治•艾略特； 《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》； 女性主义

1. Introduction
1.1 George Eliot
    The author of The Mill on the Floss was Mary Ann Evans. We know her by her pen name, George Eliot. She was a country girl whose father managed rural estates for the well-to-do. Country life was not for Mary Ann, however. She was brilliant and unorthodox. She moved to London. She scandalized her family. She wrote some of the best novels in the English language. Mary Ann Evans -- George Eliot, as we know her -- had an older brother named Isaac. Like Tom and Maggie, they were close playmates in childhood, but different as day and night. Isaac was stern, unimaginative and impatient with his sister's impulsive nature. The two were raised in a Fundamentalist Christian household. Isaac conformed to the family culture. His sister did not. She broke away, went to London and settled in the Bohemian literary world. In her early thirties, she began living openly with a married man, the editor and critic, George Lewes. Isaac was appalled. Lewes's marriage had been a scandal even in freethinking London. For some time, his wife had been having an affair more or less openly with one of his colleagues. Lewes and his wife had had three children, and because they had three children, divorce was impossible .You can imagine how the upright Isaac took the news of his sister's becoming Mrs. Lewes without benefit of the clergy. She told him about it in a letter, and he answered so coldly that she never expected to hear from him again. Unlike Maggie Tulliver, George Eliot found lifelong happiness with the man she'd taken from another woman. She and Lewes lived as a devoted, married couple until his death twenty-five years later. That did not impress Isaac. For twenty-five years he refused to see her or to write. Even when Lewes died, Isaac remained silent. At the age of sixty, George Eliot married a man twenty years younger than she was. She had her lawyer pass the news to Isaac's lawyer. Isaac replied at last. "My dear sister," his note began. It gave him much pleasure, he said, to break the long silence between them by congratulating her on her marriage. She died six months later. Isaac came to her funeral.