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3.75 AVERAGE
3.75 AVERAGE
Not my favorite of George Eliot's books. The Gwendolyn and Mordecai sections were so completely separate from each other that it was like two completely different books were grafted together. I found Gwendolyn's transformation more interesting than Deronda's and grew frustrated with the pages and pages of spiritual/political monologue that eventually took over the story. This is particularly disappointing because I absolutely loved the first half of the book—the fact that it ended up with two stars shows just how much I disliked the second half. I do appreciate the historical context, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable for me.
challenging
hopeful
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Finally finished this bloody book! Thought 'well I enjoyed one long George Eliot so why wouldn’t I enjoy another?'. Because it's completely different Eleri that's why. I don't mind the dense language if I'm invested in the story but I hated Gwendolen she was intolerably vain and Deronda was an annoying wet blanket. Interesting from the perspective of reading about 19th century perceptions of Judaism and Zionism. And I did vaguely get invested in Deronda's quest to find out about his parentage. But that was about it. High effort - low reward.
Read this as part of a book group—not at all my cup of tea. There are too many characters; too many verbose, lengthy descriptions, too much of the same emotion. I enjoyed Middlemarch and thought this would follow, but no.
I was not sufficiently intimidated by this massive book when I picked it up, but it tired me out. The plot was interesting and, as always, George Eliot’s writing is extraordinary. That being said, not very much happened over the course of the 30 hours I invested in this book. I enjoyed the story, but I wouldn’t reread it and there are a lot of other books I would recommend before this one.
Of note: for someone who's my favorite author, I haven't 5-starred a George Eliot book since the first one that I read. Tough crowd, I guess. But tough books, too. And while I'll possibly never love anything as much as The Mill on the Floss, this book did incredible things and opened up dozens of doors in my mind.
What made it most incredible to me was the thematic currents that kept coming in doubles. I started keeping a list too late to remember everything I felt was there, but so many things in the book silently depend on each other, and are left for comparison without being presented explicitly. It all looked intentional to me, because every reminder of something that had come before (usually on the other side of the novel) tightened the cord around it and made me gasp. It was an ideas book more than a feelings book, to me. Some of these repeating ideas:
* The subjection of marriage: Gwendolen wishes she didn't have to marry because she sees all women made inferior by it (but she fails to escape the same), Daniel's mother's speech is about her victory over same being the focal purpose of her life (but exemplifies the "monstrosity" of what that sacrifices).
* Legitimacy and the manipulation of inheritance: Grandcourt's and Gwendolen's responses to the claim of his children and his will, and Daniel being presumed to be Hugo's natural heir but having to cede his claim to Grandcourt. Daniel's mother removed him from his Jewish inheritance, but he becomes Mordecai's spiritual heir in the end.
* Acting/singing/performance and renown: Daniel's mother treasured her celebrated career above all, Mirah failed at the same one but remains beloved, Gwendolen relied on this kind of performance to appear perfect (though she is only valued for it artificially), and Daniel is unashamed of his own "mediocrity".
*Gwendolen empowers keys over the things she existentially fears: the strangely grotesque painting in the drawing room at Offendene that she locks up (until the key is stolen and it's exposed), and the dagger she keeps locked away behind a key she drops in the ocean to escape her murderous thoughts.
* Gwendolen's various gambles and the lesson of other people's losses.
Those are all five stars, right there.
I did a very elementary bit of critical reading after I finished. Mostly I was spurred to by the totally unsatisfactory Introduction, which is pretty much RIYL other George Eliot books. However, it did point me to a jaw-droppingly weird blip of literary history in which Henry James reviews the book via fictional dialogue in The Atlantic Monthly in 1876. It's frankly crazy. And though, mainly, those "characters" compliment the book, what "they" really seem to need to say is, WTF did she have to write about Jews for?, in the most acceptably impolite ways possible. (There's talk of noses, and dirtiness. A horrible, valuable picture of what Eliot's audience actually was.)
I was astonished to find, though, that apparently this is still what most critics feel about the book (at least, if I'm to believe the Introduction, which must be something of an endorsed opinion). Scholars still think this Jewish plot is uncomfortable, for one reason or another: because it's just plain weird, or because even the most conscientious Victorians were not 21st-century politically-correct so it doesn't seem very "right" now, or because they just like Gwendolen's plot better. There is, in fact, a whole argument that the book as is is a mistake, and Gwendolen's story standing alone would be a better novel.
WHAT ARE THEY, STUPID?!*
(* Would you like to read a whole article of speculation about Daniel's penis? What? It's not stupid, IT'S SCHOLARLY!)
But, so, in this novel there's Daniel's story and there's Gwendolen's story, and then there's their story together. Gwendolen is a selfish creature who gets punished enormously with a transformative, tormenting marriage. Daniel has neither a future nor history of his own, and rescues/reunites/becomes the savior (?) of a pair of Jewish siblings instead. He also, by accident, becomes Gwendolen's confidant as she searches for a moral compass for the first time in her life. He is it.
To begin with, this third portion of the story would be all but meaningless if Daniel's own portion didn't exist, and it is here that the book's most significant meaning comes from. Another author could have written this book, but instead of what happens here, Gwendolen would simply have fallen in love with Daniel once her marriage is unhappy, because that's what happens in novels. Here, Eliot does something completely unique (as always!) by instead giving them a strangely urgent ethical connection: the woman so horrified by submission becomes unable to do anything, anything at all, without asking Daniel's directions, worrying about Daniel's opinion, or repeating Daniel's advice like a mantra. Is this because she loves him? Maybe! But it doesn't matter at all. The sheer tonnage of her need for him is heaped only on her monumental effort to cope with doing harm, and she clings to him as a spiritual guide like a drowning person who almost drowns the person saving her.
People also seem to think that Deronda is not much of a character -- that he's too good, he's unflawed, a boring vessel for enlightenment. He does represent these things thematically, but as an individual, I guess these readers skipped the days where Daniel judges people ungenerously (and anti-semitically), keeps information from his friends, becomes super resentful of the way others think, and wishes dearly for Gwendolen to leave him alone. He is not always right when he does these things, but he is always understandable. We have sympathy for him the whole time, and in the large view he is indeed a marvelous person. That doesn't make a bad character at all, and most importantly, Eliot makes his marvelous nature the main currency of all the stories in the book. He does hold the novel together and (like Gwendolen) it is better for knowing him.
As far as Gwendolen is concerned, I often think it's a shame that as an upstanding (though comparatively sexually-liberated) Victorian, Eliot is unable to write about sex in her novels. I believe she often had it in mind, but with writing about it being so out of the question, who knows. Of the four novels I've read, though, three (and really I just don't remember Romola well enough to count it) have arcs that are supremely relevant to sexual circumstances between the characters. And it isn't like, Elizabeth and Darcy are super hot for each other, I bet they were happy to have sex. In Eliot it's serious heart-punches, like: these people ran away together in order to have sex but can't do it and this is their downfall; these people got married but he might not have any sex with her at all and this is their downfall; and in this book, Grandcourt makes such a project of total dominance in his marriage to Gwendolen, it must have been the ugliest wedding night ever and I almost want to cry thinking about it. (The this-century BBC movie hints at unwilling sex in this way, but it of course is not referenced in the text.) These sexual situations matter deeply, though existing barely even in subtext, and as soon as the Grandcourts' marriage became about power and breaking each other's will, it's what I thought of. It is a pretty unsexy sex plot, but I really think it is one. Gwendolen's misery is made apparent, but I think there is a whole other horror show here that we don't even see.
The subject of Jewish people does stand out in the book. What other book is like this? It's a truly unusual choice for a novel at this time. And, I've been trying to read some things to indicate the range of opinions about Jews that George Eliot put forward herself at various times. It was not always good (1848). Though by the time she wrote this, she was reaching for something good (1876). And this reach is what makes it a George Eliot novel: this is her one big cosmopolitan work that depicts the world she lived in as an adult, the learned upper class that led cranky, fractured lives in the country and in town and abroad. How did she choose to write about this? By turning her "gentle" characters upside-down inside prejudice, regret, and subjection. It makes the novel big like the world, and it stuns you into paying attention.
While I looked up sources for Eliot's views on Judaism, I also looked for some criticism of the book that touched on Benjamin Disraeli, and only found a little. But the connection was pointed out to me and now seems really important, though I only know a few things about him: he was Prime Minister when the book was published, he was born in a Jewish family but raised Anglican, and he was a novelist as well. Did he and George Eliot know each other? Were they friends or rivals? What did she think of his politics, and did she model Daniel's ambitions to greatly serve the world after him? The novel was (intentionally or not?) seen as inspiration/propaganda for Zionists of both the Christian and Jewish kind, and this troublesome, impenetrable essay (?) in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Eliot's final book which I don't quite understand what it is?) is on the subject of cultural homelands. There are streets in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa named after her! BECAUSE OF DANIEL DERONDA. THAT'S CRAZY! And, in my opinion, is proof that this theme is not meaningless.
There are some troubles. There is some racism, try though she does. Mirah is overcompensation for this, though once she stops getting rescued she finally sounds like a real person and not a simply-sweet Dickens character. I never really loved Gwendolen, although her development is strong and passionate and unflawed except maybe. That was also a little melodramatic, I guess, since the end events are strong enough. They always are. (And jiminy cricket do not get in one of George Eliot's little boats 3/4 through the book! Crazy shit ensues, every time! Oh, but I love it.)
I also think there's a loose end in not hearing Mrs. Glasher's response to the end events. If I were an editor I might have suggested that she and Gwendolen needed to connect one more time. It might not have made things any better for Gwendolen, but a change in the situation undeniably occurred. How did it leave them?
Weirdly, at the end I actually wished that this book had a sequel. Then I read a little more about it (this great review in particular) and learned that this HAPPENED. This 1878 version of fanfiction was published as a sequel to "remedy" its "chief defect," which apparently means the Jews. So, instead of editing an abridged version to accomplish this, we just have a ret-conning follow-up novel. … I am so perplexed, I think I am actually going to read it someday. (The reviewer also mentions a Jewish adaptation by the contemporary children's author Marcus Lehman, which may be this one? But I haven't found a lot to confirm it.)
Anyway, perhaps I wish that this book was simply 1200 pages long instead of 600. I might not have minded, because in the end Daniel and Gwendolen go to such places finally that their lives are wholly beginning again. I think that ending is unlike any of Eliot's others, and I wish she could have had all of time to tell us what she thought.
What made it most incredible to me was the thematic currents that kept coming in doubles. I started keeping a list too late to remember everything I felt was there, but so many things in the book silently depend on each other, and are left for comparison without being presented explicitly. It all looked intentional to me, because every reminder of something that had come before (usually on the other side of the novel) tightened the cord around it and made me gasp. It was an ideas book more than a feelings book, to me. Some of these repeating ideas:
Spoiler
* The subjection of marriage: Gwendolen wishes she didn't have to marry because she sees all women made inferior by it (but she fails to escape the same), Daniel's mother's speech is about her victory over same being the focal purpose of her life (but exemplifies the "monstrosity" of what that sacrifices).
* Legitimacy and the manipulation of inheritance: Grandcourt's and Gwendolen's responses to the claim of his children and his will, and Daniel being presumed to be Hugo's natural heir but having to cede his claim to Grandcourt. Daniel's mother removed him from his Jewish inheritance, but he becomes Mordecai's spiritual heir in the end.
* Acting/singing/performance and renown: Daniel's mother treasured her celebrated career above all, Mirah failed at the same one but remains beloved, Gwendolen relied on this kind of performance to appear perfect (though she is only valued for it artificially), and Daniel is unashamed of his own "mediocrity".
*Gwendolen empowers keys over the things she existentially fears: the strangely grotesque painting in the drawing room at Offendene that she locks up (until the key is stolen and it's exposed), and the dagger she keeps locked away behind a key she drops in the ocean to escape her murderous thoughts.
* Gwendolen's various gambles and the lesson of other people's losses.
Those are all five stars, right there.
I did a very elementary bit of critical reading after I finished. Mostly I was spurred to by the totally unsatisfactory Introduction, which is pretty much RIYL other George Eliot books. However, it did point me to a jaw-droppingly weird blip of literary history in which Henry James reviews the book via fictional dialogue in The Atlantic Monthly in 1876. It's frankly crazy. And though, mainly, those "characters" compliment the book, what "they" really seem to need to say is, WTF did she have to write about Jews for?, in the most acceptably impolite ways possible. (There's talk of noses, and dirtiness. A horrible, valuable picture of what Eliot's audience actually was.)
I was astonished to find, though, that apparently this is still what most critics feel about the book (at least, if I'm to believe the Introduction, which must be something of an endorsed opinion). Scholars still think this Jewish plot is uncomfortable, for one reason or another: because it's just plain weird, or because even the most conscientious Victorians were not 21st-century politically-correct so it doesn't seem very "right" now, or because they just like Gwendolen's plot better. There is, in fact, a whole argument that the book as is is a mistake, and Gwendolen's story standing alone would be a better novel.
WHAT ARE THEY, STUPID?!*
(* Would you like to read a whole article of speculation about Daniel's penis? What? It's not stupid, IT'S SCHOLARLY!)
But, so, in this novel there's Daniel's story and there's Gwendolen's story, and then there's their story together. Gwendolen is a selfish creature who gets punished enormously with a transformative, tormenting marriage. Daniel has neither a future nor history of his own, and rescues/reunites/becomes the savior (?) of a pair of Jewish siblings instead. He also, by accident, becomes Gwendolen's confidant as she searches for a moral compass for the first time in her life. He is it.
To begin with, this third portion of the story would be all but meaningless if Daniel's own portion didn't exist, and it is here that the book's most significant meaning comes from. Another author could have written this book, but instead of what happens here, Gwendolen would simply have fallen in love with Daniel once her marriage is unhappy, because that's what happens in novels. Here, Eliot does something completely unique (as always!) by instead giving them a strangely urgent ethical connection: the woman so horrified by submission becomes unable to do anything, anything at all, without asking Daniel's directions, worrying about Daniel's opinion, or repeating Daniel's advice like a mantra. Is this because she loves him? Maybe! But it doesn't matter at all. The sheer tonnage of her need for him is heaped only on her monumental effort to cope with doing harm, and she clings to him as a spiritual guide like a drowning person who almost drowns the person saving her.
People also seem to think that Deronda is not much of a character -- that he's too good, he's unflawed, a boring vessel for enlightenment. He does represent these things thematically, but as an individual, I guess these readers skipped the days where Daniel judges people ungenerously (and anti-semitically), keeps information from his friends, becomes super resentful of the way others think, and wishes dearly for Gwendolen to leave him alone. He is not always right when he does these things, but he is always understandable. We have sympathy for him the whole time, and in the large view he is indeed a marvelous person. That doesn't make a bad character at all, and most importantly, Eliot makes his marvelous nature the main currency of all the stories in the book. He does hold the novel together and (like Gwendolen) it is better for knowing him.
As far as Gwendolen is concerned, I often think it's a shame that as an upstanding (though comparatively sexually-liberated) Victorian, Eliot is unable to write about sex in her novels. I believe she often had it in mind, but with writing about it being so out of the question, who knows. Of the four novels I've read, though, three (and really I just don't remember Romola well enough to count it) have arcs that are supremely relevant to sexual circumstances between the characters. And it isn't like, Elizabeth and Darcy are super hot for each other, I bet they were happy to have sex. In Eliot it's serious heart-punches, like: these people ran away together in order to have sex but can't do it and this is their downfall; these people got married but he might not have any sex with her at all and this is their downfall; and in this book, Grandcourt makes such a project of total dominance in his marriage to Gwendolen, it must have been the ugliest wedding night ever and I almost want to cry thinking about it. (The this-century BBC movie hints at unwilling sex in this way, but it of course is not referenced in the text.) These sexual situations matter deeply, though existing barely even in subtext, and as soon as the Grandcourts' marriage became about power and breaking each other's will, it's what I thought of. It is a pretty unsexy sex plot, but I really think it is one. Gwendolen's misery is made apparent, but I think there is a whole other horror show here that we don't even see.
The subject of Jewish people does stand out in the book. What other book is like this? It's a truly unusual choice for a novel at this time. And, I've been trying to read some things to indicate the range of opinions about Jews that George Eliot put forward herself at various times. It was not always good (1848). Though by the time she wrote this, she was reaching for something good (1876). And this reach is what makes it a George Eliot novel: this is her one big cosmopolitan work that depicts the world she lived in as an adult, the learned upper class that led cranky, fractured lives in the country and in town and abroad. How did she choose to write about this? By turning her "gentle" characters upside-down inside prejudice, regret, and subjection. It makes the novel big like the world, and it stuns you into paying attention.
While I looked up sources for Eliot's views on Judaism, I also looked for some criticism of the book that touched on Benjamin Disraeli, and only found a little. But the connection was pointed out to me and now seems really important, though I only know a few things about him: he was Prime Minister when the book was published, he was born in a Jewish family but raised Anglican, and he was a novelist as well. Did he and George Eliot know each other? Were they friends or rivals? What did she think of his politics, and did she model Daniel's ambitions to greatly serve the world after him? The novel was (intentionally or not?) seen as inspiration/propaganda for Zionists of both the Christian and Jewish kind, and this troublesome, impenetrable essay (?) in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Eliot's final book which I don't quite understand what it is?) is on the subject of cultural homelands. There are streets in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa named after her! BECAUSE OF DANIEL DERONDA. THAT'S CRAZY! And, in my opinion, is proof that this theme is not meaningless.
There are some troubles. There is some racism, try though she does. Mirah is overcompensation for this, though once she stops getting rescued she finally sounds like a real person and not a simply-sweet Dickens character. I never really loved Gwendolen, although her development is strong and passionate and unflawed except maybe
Spoiler
that I didn't really believe she was harboring murderous wishes, and was put off when she confessed to having themI also think there's a loose end in not hearing Mrs. Glasher's response to the end events. If I were an editor I might have suggested that she and Gwendolen needed to connect one more time. It might not have made things any better for Gwendolen, but a change in the situation undeniably occurred. How did it leave them?
Weirdly, at the end I actually wished that this book had a sequel. Then I read a little more about it (this great review in particular) and learned that this HAPPENED. This 1878 version of fanfiction was published as a sequel to "remedy" its "chief defect," which apparently means the Jews. So, instead of editing an abridged version to accomplish this, we just have a ret-conning follow-up novel. … I am so perplexed, I think I am actually going to read it someday. (The reviewer also mentions a Jewish adaptation by the contemporary children's author Marcus Lehman, which may be this one? But I haven't found a lot to confirm it.)
Anyway, perhaps I wish that this book was simply 1200 pages long instead of 600. I might not have minded, because in the end Daniel and Gwendolen go to such places finally that their lives are wholly beginning again. I think that ending is unlike any of Eliot's others, and I wish she could have had all of time to tell us what she thought.
Well, I keep having to quit the other book I'm trying to read, which I'm going to just take as a sign that instead I should pick up my Daniel Deronda, contemplate its perfection, and see how much of it I can reread before attending a nerdy lecture day about it in a few weeks.
I am cheating and adding a new edition of it because I might want to talk about it all over again, even though I've read it before.
I am cheating and adding a new edition of it because I might want to talk about it all over again, even though I've read it before.
I remember liking this very much but don't remember why.
3.5 stars, actually. I would have given it 4 if the book were 300 pages shorter.
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea.'Daniel Deronda' is an uncomfortable book, and it will be uncomfortable so long as antisemitism exists. The work posits no questions (where did the hatred for Jewish people come from?) and delivers no answers (how did the fictional scene of casual wishes for antisemitic extermination set the stage for the Shoah?), but instead serves as a marker stone, one of the more prominent in English literature. DD is, as the introduction likes to babble on about, an imperfect work, but much as it doesn't matter if my students get ten questions perfect if the time was allotted for them to do sixty, Evans is working on a higher tier than the vast majority of novelists of both her time, those preceding, and even some of the future. Full of bad faith and undermining that both the introduction and end notes are, the editor does see fit to draw comparisons to Baldwin, who similarly posited neither answers nor solutions to the antiblackness that continues to throttle his questions of origin. Evans' warning is nowhere near as dire, but it is a portrait of warning nonetheless, as with nationalism comes country, and with country comes internationally recognized means of enacting justice. It will take another seven decades after DD for Eichmann to be extradited to Israel, but like any society aware of the hierarchy, the English like their underbelly safely digested in the history books and the scriptures, a people eradicated before a people can come again.
Gwendolyn had not considered that the desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection[.]
Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.
He had no idea of a moral repulsion, and could not have believed, if he had been told it, that they may be a resentment and disgust which will gradually make beauty more detestable than ugliness, through exasperation at that outward virtue in which hateful things can flaunt themselves or find a supercilious advantage.
Why should a gentleman whose other relations in life are carried on without the luxury of sympathetic feeling, be supposed to require that kind of condiment in domestic life?This novel, more than any other I've encountered, illustrates by slow and steady degrees the concepts of the gendered spheres of influence and their artificially constructed realms of influence. Gwendolyn is the interior by conventional rote, Daniel's is the exterior by comparatively obscene freedom, and the tales told of wives and their husbands have all the reliability of the myth of the American Dream, wherein one is raised through a sacrifice of millions and used as proof of quantitative success. Grandcourt is the pinnacle of English civilization, complete with a surname reminiscent of those countries of Norman conquest, and that place on high births a sadistic, phlegmatic patriarch, replete with dictatorial leisure and socipolitical control so fine one can will understand the origins of Big Brother. As such, this is not a comfortable novel by any means, as it affords men the purest presentation of the powers they may execute and the women the purest experience of how said powers are executed upon them. This is the case for both Christian and Jewish, as the person who wrote in the introduction that all the Jewish are constructed as literal angels never looked at Klemser, or Lapidoth, or Leonora Halm-Eberstein, or any of the minor characters who argued and solicited and otherwise lived their lives in countries that had made plain to them that Jewish people did not and would never belong other than as dissolved and destroyed cultural curiosities to be claimed as heritage by and neoliberal type: the last incremental functioning of a sometimes aggressive, sometimes passive genocide.
[H]e never did choose to kick any animal, because the act of kicking is a compromising attitude, and a gentleman's dog should be kicked for him.
Still, for those who prefer command to love, one does not see why the habit should change precisely at the point of matrimony.
You are not a woman. You may try — but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out — "this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by fixed recipe.The problem most readers probably have with this book is that there are no sinners and there are no saints; there are only systems and how well the individual survives their intersections. Gwendolyn is a Christian mirror to a Jewish couple, and each woman looks on the other as an object of abject envy while entrapped within their respective patriarchal entrapments. No woman who plays the game ever comes out a saint, and all an author such as Evans can do is tell the truth about such human beings. This is best expressed, much as Tanizaki did with [b:Naomi|34462|Naomi|Jun'ichirō Tanizaki|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1366810659s/34462.jpg|1045331] and Smith with [b:On Beauty|3679|On Beauty|Zadie Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1495961870s/3679.jpg|910752], by putting the pathos on the side of the close third person male narrator and the ethos and logos on the side of the little to none embodied yet still powerfully outspoken female side character/narrator obsession. There is nothing cruel or dehumanizing in letting a representative of a demographic whom the author will never be able to truly represent to speak for themselves, and if if the fates of Gwendolyn and other characters do not seem "feminist" (I have to say, 2000 pounds a year now, converted 161k pounds a year now, converted to 223k dollars, isn't bad at all), it is because, once again, feminism is being interpreted as once again stuffing a human being into a complex ideal instead of being allowed to make mistakes, compromise, and survive through the ugly tenacity such systems of gender intersected with religion intersected with historical persecution breeds among their populations. When Evans ended where she did, she had a hope that the life sustaining Jewish tracts of Ezra, replete with all the complications of Jewish human beings such as Leonara, Mirah, and Lapidoth, had outweighed all the casual wishes of extermination espoused by the perfectly bred English type. The English system may permit the Jewish to survive, but such a situation that rendered such permission of utmost necessity should never have existed in the first place.
I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play — grand, with an iron will...But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself.
Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father's will was against it.
She had only to collect her memories, which proved to her that 'anybody' regarded illegitimate children as more rightfully to be looked shy on and deprived of social advantages than illegitimate fathers.In the end, there are Jewish people marrying Christian people, despite the accusations of racism (one, race is far too young to meld with such a beast as antisemitism; two, antisemitism has persisted so long as to to formulate a veritable enclave of common DNA, so pardon the wariness of the oppressed and do something about the alt-right/Neo-Nazis kthx), necessary critiques of Evans' portrayals of Judaism (however much the editor attempts to undermine such credible evaluations), and an unwritten half, easy, of a book devoted to further adventures of Gwendolyn Harleth and Daniel Deronda. I wish all authors had been half as brave with their last novel, for to go out on a limb for those with little to no political power, all for the sake of a common humanity, very rarely puts food on the table. This work is, in essence, an antithesis to Tolstoy's rant in W&P's epilogue that the printing press had doomed humanity, but it does not mean DD does not stoop to using lazy metaphors for the sake of narrative impetus, or that it was a gripping ride for every one of its 900 pages. What it means is that it undertakes the dull and demoralizing work of fending off the sea lions and status quo critics and other passively murderous sorts long enough for a stereotype to become flesh and bone and bring hope to those who have been condemned to live in that stereotype for seeming perpetuity. If more authors of the past, which no personal identity stake in the matter), had taken it upon themselves to raise up those who are customarily beaten down, we may never have had a Shoah at all. The evil lies not with the imperfect life, but with the complacency that views both said life and its representations and says, oh well. It will never happen to me.
I can't say that he is not active in imagining what goes on in other people—but then he always imagines it to fit his own inclination.
Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honoured and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep; and all of us in our turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbours do not admire us.
That prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide us far in practice. Mirah's feelings, she tells us, are concerned what is.
Every objection can be answered if you take broad ground enough, Hans: no special question of conduct can be properly settled in that way[.]
[T]here will still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to – which seems to me as bad a superstition or false god as any that has been set up without the ceremonies of philosophising.
To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from a bridge beyond the cornfields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes