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The Mill on the Floss is a bildungsroman—literally a “novel of education”—a book that centers on a young person’s transition into adulthood. The bildungsroman was a very popular genre in nineteenth-century European literature. Charles Dickens’s David Copperfifield (1850) and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (1759), are prominent examples. With its focus on the coming of age of a young girl, Maggie Tulliver, The Mill on the Floss recalls other classic bildungsroman focused on female protagonists, like Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In particular, Brontë’s Jane closely resembles Eliot’s Maggie: both women are bookish, passionate, have a rich interior emotional life, and struggle with the restrictions placed on women’s behavior and choices in nineteenth-century Britain. In focusing on the unique challenges facing a woman’s coming of age, Brontë and Eliot subvert the traditional bildungsroman narrative by reminding readers that a woman’s growth into adulthood often involves a conflict between her intellectual ambitions and her prescribed social role.