Such is Maggie, the moving example given in The Mill on the Floss, in which George Eliot embodied the doubts and courageous rebellions of her youth against Victorian England; the heroes particularly Tom, Maggie's brother stubbornly affirm conventional wisdom, immobilizing morality in formal rules: Maggie tries to reintroduce a breath of life, she overturns them, she goes to the limits of her solitude and emerges as a pure freedom beyond the fossilized male universe.