ABSTRACT
In The Mill on the Floss Maggie Tulliver refuses to finish Madame de Stael's Corinne because she does not want to read yet another book in which the fair woman rather than the intelligent one wins the man. 1 In so doing, she scrutinizes the rules by which we judge the success of women, even intellectual women like Corinne, and finds that they are those of the romance: the winner is the one who gets the man.
