Still, it is a stern critic who would deny readers the pleasure of spotting which parts of her own childhood George Eliot transferred to Tom and Maggie. Literary theorists tend not to approve of reading novels as if they were fictionalised autobiography. It was as if Eliot had been working through what she called the 'many strata' of collective memory before she was ready, finally, to confront her own past.

Adam Bede (1859) was based on the young adulthood of her father, her uncle and her uncle's wife. Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) was drawn from stories circulating around her childhood community about a series of mild scandals that had taken place several decades earlier. Shortly before it came out she explained to a friend that my 'mind works with most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remotest past', and her first two novels had indeed truffled her own prehistory. Unusually for such an intensely autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss was not Eliot's first work of fiction, but her third. The brother and sister who, like Tom and Maggie, had once 'roamed the daisied fields together' in loving childhood, would never meet again. This silence was to stretch bleakly over the coming quarter of a century. Even more hurtfully, he had instructed their sister to break off contact too. Ever since she had written to Isaac Evans three years before to explain that she was now cohabiting in London with the married Lewes – 'Mrs Lewes' was a term of social convenience, her legal name remained Mary Ann Evans – the rigidly respectable Isaac had refused to have anything to do with her. More than mere melodrama, the watery hug represented a wishful reworking of Eliot's fractured relationship with her own adored brother, with whom she had grown up on the Warwickshire family farm in the 1820s.

The mill on the floss pages