A brother and sister on a Lincolnshire mill-stream, and a childhood loyalty that survives everything except the town's opinion. Eliot put more of her own family into this than into any other book, and quarreled with her brother in life exactly as Maggie quarrels with Tom. The flood at the end was decided before anything else. Fifty-eight plates of nineteenth-century portraiture by Francis Grant, John Linnell and others, gathered here as a companion gallery to Eliot's own family romance.
