A review by mepresley
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad tense slow-paced

5.0

Daniel Deronda was Eliot’s last, and most ambitious novel. Given Eliot’s belief that it was a novelist’s job to show the world as it is, and to cultivate sympathy for all kinds of people in all of their differences and flaws, it could not be a more appropriate final text for her to have written. 

Eliot, having gone on her own personal journey similar to Daniel’s, from a casual anti-Semitism absorbed from the surrounding culture, to knowledge and advocacy that is so revolutionary it puts forth the ideas of Zionism 20 years before they really emerge. 

The novel is, to be fair, and uneven one. Eliot had a mission, and the Queen’s ear; she was riding on the popularity and influence of a successful career that had made her incredibly wealthy. She could afford to take risks, and anticipated the novel would encounter a good deal of criticism surrounding its “Jewish half.”

And it’s true that the

Mordecai chapters are a bit of a slog. He isn’t really given characteristics outside of his religious mission, and he talks at great length about it repeatedly. Eliot was incredibly smart to make these revolutionary characters so non-threatening: Mordecai, poor and dying of consumption; Mirah, submissive and good to her core, in need of rescuing; and Daniel, with his own anti-Jewish prejudice and his identity as an English gentleman, only revealed in Book VII to be himself a Jew. 

But I don’t think it’s true that the Jewish half of the novel isn’t integrated purposefully and fully with Gwendolen’s more interesting half. It’s not really a fair fight to compare such uncomplicated characters in their overabundance of goodness and faith—with little happening in the way of action—to Gwendolen, so full of fire and passion, then so miserable and caged. 

There are so many places that the novel is weaved together, and Book VIII cements that through the friendship of Sir Hugo and Mr. Gascoigne, and their shared commitment to look after Gwendolen in the wake of Grandcourt’s shabby provisions for her in the will. 

I love that Eliot bucks the tradition of the Victorian novel, not uniting hero and heroine (Gwendolen and Daniel), and having characters in the book themselves frustrated at this twist (Hans, Sir Hugo, Lady Mallinger); by showing a marriage (and one full of abuse in the upper classes, at that); and by ending the novel with Ezra’s death rather than Mirah and Daniel’s wedding. 

It’s not really a 5 star book objectively, but the language is so beautiful, and the project so complex and difficult, and Gwendolen so special, that it more than compensates for the flaws. Plus, I have a nostalgic attachment to the book, among the first Victorian novels that I loved.