Rewind book: The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot (1860)

The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
William Blackwood

Spoiler alert: don't read on if you intend to read The Mill on the Floss. You've been warned: the two main characters, Maggie Tulliver and brother Tom, drown in each other's arms in the swollen River Floss.

It's a dramatic ending, but you'll likely see it coming - there are heavy hints from Mrs Tulliver grumbling that Maggie will probably fall in the river and drown one day, as well as plenty of references to water and flooding. George Eliot (the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans) might have felt the need to labour this point in order to justify what many saw as a dissatisfying ending but there was no way out of it: Eliot had written herself into a hole with Maggie.

The chances of Maggie reconciling with Tom are so remote by the end of the book that killing her off in this way - brother and sister locked together "in an embrace never to be parted" - is the only way to salvage their sibling relationship and hammer home Eliot's key theme about the importance of family.

This is the most autobiographical of all Eliot's novels. Her relationship with her own brother, Isaac, was fraught. She adored her older sibling, but they had a serious falling out when she revealed that she was living with a married man, George Henry Lewes.

This wasn't quite as bad as it sounds. Lewes and his wife were living apart, but a complicated legal issue meant Lewes couldn't divorce and then marry Eliot. Their relationship was considered scandalous among London society and Eliot's brother cut off all ties until Lewes' death in 1878.