SOURCE: "The Novels of George Eliot," in George Eliot and Her Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews, edited by John Holmstrom and Laurence Lerner, Barnes & Noble, 1966, pp. 42-4.

James was an American novelist, short story writer, critic, and essayist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the English language, he is also admired as a lucid and insightful critic. In this article, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1866, James offers an early and largely favorable review of The Mill on the Floss.

… Of the four English studies, The Mill on the Floss seems to me to have most dramatic continuity, in distinction from that descriptive, discursive method of narration which I have attempted to indicate. After Hetty Sorrel, I think Maggie Tulliver the most successful of the author's young women, and after Tito Melema, Tom Tulliver the best...