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Daniel Deronda (Oxford World's Classics)

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"Daniel Deronda" was the last novel George Eliot wrote, and it's an appropriate finale to her career -- a lushly-written, heartfelt story about a young man searching for his past (and clues to his future), as well as a vibrant strong-willed young lady who discovers that life doesn't always go your way. Even better, Eliot deftly avoided the cliches and caricatures of the Jewish people, portraying them with love and respect.

Daniel Deronda is the ward (and rumored illegitimate son) of a nobleman, who is unsure of his past (particularly of his mother) catching a glimpse of pretty, reckless, arrogant Gwendolyn Harleth at a casino. Gwendolyn (who boasts that she gets everything she wants) is interested in Daniel, but when her family loses all their money, she marries a rich suitor, a relative of Daniel's -- knowing that his mistress and illegitimate children will be disinherited. But she soon finds that her new husband is a sadistic brute, and sees Daniel as her only help.

Meanwhile, Daniel rescues the despairing Mirah Lapidoth from a suicide attempt in the river, and he helps the young Jewish singer find a home and friends to care for her. As he helps her find her family, he becomes passionately attached to the Jewish population and their plight, embodied by a dying young visionary and a kindly shopkeeping family. Then he receives an important message -- one that will illuminate his roots, and give him a course for the future.

When Eliot published her final novel, it caused a massive stir -- not many novelists tackled the plight of the Jewish population, or how it compared to the gilded upper classes. In a way, "Daniel Deronda" is both a love triangle and an allegory -- Daniel must choose between the pretty, shallow English life (Gwendolyn) or a rich Jewish heritage (Mirah) with a background of tragedy.

The biggest problem with Eliot's writing is that it becomes a little too lush and dense at times, and the narrative moves a bit slowly (in the Victorian manner). But that flaw doesn't rob her writing of its power or beauty -- she describes every feeling, gesture and emotion in detail, as well as the sumptuous balls, exquisitely gilded mansions, and every shadowy tree or rich expanse of land ("a grassy court enclosed on three sides by a gothic cloister").

Yet the greatest power is in the stories that twine like ivy over the main plot -- a young Jewish girl's search for her family, a sadistic man's search for a wild lovely girl he can break, and especially of the composer Herr Klesmer and his sweet, atypical love story with Miss Arrowpoint. And the last quarter of the book is wrapped in Daniel's search for his own family, culminating in a quietly tense encounter with someone from his long-ago past.

Daniel almost seems like a character too good to be true -- unselfish, kind, universally kindly and very intelligent, though possessed of a vaguely searching quality. Gwendolyn is his complete opposite: she has been raised to be selfish, disdainful and immature, but as the book goes on she learns that selfishness doesn't pay -- marriage to the despicable Grandcourt changes her from a selfish little girl into a scarred but stronger woman.

The third leg of the triangle is Mirah, who is not given the loving attention that Gwendolyn is, but who is still a compelling figure -- her father tried to sell her, and now she wanders through England searching for her family. And the book is littered with many other striking characters: the sadistic Grandcourt and his creepy servant Lush, the crotchety but kindly Klesmer, the spirited artist Hans, the kindly Sir Hugo and the doomed, strong-willed Mordecai.

"Daniel Deronda" is a beautiful portrait of a young man's search for his past, and a young woman's struggle with the fruits of her own selfishness. What's more, George Eliot's last novel is a loving, powerful portrait of the Jewish people, in a time when they were caricatured at best.

In what may be her most exciting and original novel, George Eliot weaves two completely different plots, one of which is a uniquely sympathetic and fully developed story with Jewish protagonists. Presenting no Jewish stereotypes, as we see in Dickens (in Oliver Twist and other novels) and even Trollope (with The Way We Live Now (Barnes & Noble Classics)), she depicts characters who have, in one case, tried to avoid their heritage and in another have been drawn irrevocably to a religion and culture with which they have had no previous contact.

Daniel Deronda, a young man who has been brought up as an English gentleman by Sir Hugo Mallinger, has never known his real parents, secretly fearing that he is illegitimate. As time passes, he longs to understand the circumstances of his birth, especially after Sir Hugo marries and produces heirs of his own. Beautiful Gwendolen Harleth, selfish and manipulative, is romantically attracted to Daniel, but a sudden change in her family's financial status leads her into a precipitous but financially advantageous marriage to the arrogant Henleigh Grandcourt. Meanwhile, Daniel saves a young woman from drowning herself, a singer named Mirah Lapidoth who is in despair. Mirah, a Jew, has been stolen from her family by her father, whom she suspects planned to sell her into white slavery, and she desperately misses her mother and brother, whom she can no longer find. As she progresses with her singing career, she never forgets her heritage, of which she is inordinately proud.

As Eliot develops the various social settings of this fascinating novel, written in 1876, a full picture of British society evolves. To protect Mirah from her father and her own despair, Daniel places her in the home of friends and resolves to try to find her family. When Daniel discovers her brother Mordecai, a Jewish mystic and seer, Mordecai is convinced, against all odds, that Daniel is Jewish--and is the person who will carry his visions for a Jewish nation to fruition. As the novel develops further, Eliot explores Jewish mysticism, religious traditions, and cultural heritage, even as she also uses the shallow, aristocratic life of Gwendolen Harleth Grandcourt as a contrast to that of Mirah.

The novel is unique in its favorable and lengthy depiction of Judaism and in its illustration of Judaism's cultural superiority to superficial, aristocratic British life. Mirah and her family take center stage in terms of sympathy, despite the fact the Gwendolen, who in other novels might have been the heroine, suffers terribly in her miserable marriage to Grandcourt. Daring to do something completely different with this complex novel, which was her last, Eliot's vision and seriousness of purpose here created enormous controversy in its time and presaged a new direction for the novel. n Mary Whipple

Middlemarch (Signet Classics) (Signet Classics)
The Mill on the Floss (Penguin Popular Classics)
Adam Bede (Penguin Classics)
George Eliot: The Last Victorian

When an 800 page novel ends and you find yourself sighing in disappoint, knowing that you are going to miss the characters you just spent so much time with, you know you have a classic on your hands.
"Daniel Deronda" is a book of many colors- romance, comedy, satire, philosophical depiction of Judaism, a morality tale- and though its 800 pages, George Eliot does a masterful job of weaving the various strands into one coherent whole. The book starts off with one Gwendolyn Harleth, a self-centered young woman who easily could have been the title character of the story. She encounters Daniel Deronda one night while she is gambling, and though this encounter is brief, it has a lasting impact on her psyche, in both a romantic and intellectual way. Deronda then disappears from the story for awhile and we follow the story of Gwendolyn, and it is here where Eliot satirizes romance fiction and produces some of the funniest scenes in 19th century literature. The incident in which one of Gwendolyn's suitors, Rex, attempts to keep pace with the athletic equestrian during a fox hunt is outright hilarious, and establishes a tone that follows Gwendolyn throughout the book. What are we to make of this potential heroine- a selfish yet charming, intelligent yet ignorant, force with which to be reckoned?
Deronda eventually re-enters the tale and we are soon enmeshed in the tangled web which is his life. Abandoned by his mother at an early age, Deronda proceeds through life believing that his adopted uncle is actually his father while having no knowledge of his mother or her history. One day, Deronda encounters a young Jewish woman attempting to drown herself in a river, and upon saving her, Deronda begins a journey, both actual and spiritual, that will lead him straight into the heart of Judaism.
As the lengthy story unravels, Eliot goes back and forth between Gwendolyn's continued struggles to find love and live the life she feels entitled to, and Deronda's search for answers as to who he is and who are the people from which he is descended. In telling these stories, Eliot comments on the England of her time and pays great tribute to Judaism and its complexities. And while she continually paints Gwendolyn in a rather unflattering light, Eliot puts one of the most enlightened statements of the book in Gwendolyn's mouth during one of the final conversations between Gwendolyn and Deronda.
"Daniel Deronda" is the last book George Eliot wrote and it is a powerful one. Whether read as a romance, or satire, or as an honest look at a misunderstood religion and its role in the late 19th century, it is a satisfying read. It is one of the books listed in "1001 Books That You Should Read Before You Die" and rightly so.

Daniel Deronda is a shambles, a 700-page novel that would have made two excellent 200-page novellas. It was George Eliot's last novel, written after Middlemarch, and it has never been as popular as her earlier books, yet it is well worth reading despite its glaring faults in story-telling and its sententious preaching. Henry James, who should have been more overtly grateful to Eliot as a formative influence on his own works, lambasted her for her inability to let a story speak for itself, that is, to be indirect and implicit. Then, as we all know, James took his own recommended indirection to preposterous lengths.

I labored long and hard over Daniel Deronda, a novel probably too ambitious for its time and its writer's idiom, one of the most fascinating failures I'v ever read. It 'collapses' two novel plots into one in a manner that a 20th C novelist would have had a better template to work with. It's fabulously dramatic in its Jamesian misogynistic half -- the most intelligent woman novelist of the 19th C was decidedly not an admirer of womanhood -- and in many ways a preview of James's Portrait of a Lady. But then it's tediously interesting (!) in its visionary half, in which the title character discovers his Jewish identity and formulates Zionism a decade before anyone else in real history. The two tales are awkwardly and implausibly coupled, and Deronda is a kind of pre-Freudian spiritual paper saint. Meanwhile, Eliot's discursive perambulations are either too profound for casual reading ... or else utter blather.

Middlemarch is still, in my mind, Eliot's only Grrreat Novel, but Deronda is worth reading as a preview of all modern novel-making.

Daniel Deronda is perhaps my favourite book of all time. When I first read it, I wasn't sure what I thought of it. Elliot weaves the tale, as she designed to do, so that the reader is not quite certain of his loyalties. We root for Daniel, of course, but which of the women in his life do we wish for him to choose? In the end, of course, he chooses the more deserving of the two. And yet, do we not find ourselves rooting for that which society, in that day and age, would have chosen for him? Are we disappointed, or are we not? It all depends on with whom we identify, and sometimes that question cannot be honestly answered until we've stepped away from it far enough to see the big picture. And it is a very big picture.

Eliot, having written the book as a contemporary to the Zionist movement, was perhaps a visionary in her approach to its causes and in her method if introducing them to the reading public. The work was highly influential to many, and to society at large regarding their view of their Jewish neighbours. More than that, though, it challenged society's views of Christianity, of what it means to be a gentleman and where one's loyalties ought, after all, to lie. Daniel's benefactor, the man, indeed, who raised him, was a good man, but he failed Daniel in many respects. To satiate his need for a home and family ties with whom he could truly identify, Daniel had to make these himself, breaking off from the tradition that had been set before him. "So you do not want to be an English gentleman to the backbone," Sir Hugo says to him. Yes, of course Daniel does, but must he do it and be a Christian without Christian feeling? Be a father without fatherly affection? Be a husband who is a stranger to his wife?

Daniel Deronda is and was a Trojan horse of conscientious thought. It reads as a book written for the well bred and socially minded of the upper classes. It is, in fact, a challenge to think beyond what one thinks they believe, to ask the uncomfortable question, "Am I living the best life that is in me?" Daniel's mother asked the question and answered it selfishly. Sir Hugo asked the question and lived his life according to duty and tradition. Grandcourt asked the question and left behind him a mess of misuse, bastardry and subjugation. Daniel asked the question and chose a life that would benefit all around him. Daniel Deronda is an astounding accomplishment and I find it a constant source of inspiration, both in my life, and in my work.

This book, alongside The Mill on the Floss (1860) (Broadview Editions) and Middlemarch (Oxford World's Classics), is one of "George Eliot's greatest psychological novels." (See Rereading George Eliot: Changing Responses to Her Experiments in Life.) While the main characters, Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth, are the most finely drawn, many of the subsidiary characters also spring to life.

The plot, involving Gwendolen's horrifically bad marriage and Daniel's search for a life-purpose, is sufficiently diverting, but one reads this book more to enjoy the journey than to arrive at a specific destination. The novel begins in medias res and seems to end with many unanswered questions.

The novel alludes to many historical events contemporaneous to the time in which the story is set (1864-6). Whatever resonances Eliot expected her readers to feel from these allusions are totally swamped by the modern reader's knowledge of the calamities to occur in the next century. Her belief in nationhood seems especially naive in retrospect.

Daniel Deronda broke ground in its comparatively respectful treatment of Jews and Judaism; Eliot seems to have done a fair amount of research. One still cringes at times as old stereotypes are encountered, but, compared to Trollope, Eliot is positively enlightened.

If you are new to Eliot, you may want to try the novels mentioned above first, but you will definitely want to tackle this one subsequently.

The book came within the time frame given and in perfect condition. I would use this source when I buy a book again.