Daniel Deronda is a novel by George Eliot, first published in 1876. It was the last novel she completed, coming after Middlemarch and Felix Holt and the only one set in the contemporary Victorian society of her day. Its mixture of social satire and moral searching with a sympathetic rendering of Jewish proto-Zionist and Kaballistic ideas has made it a controversial final statement of one of the greatest of Victorian novelists.

The novel has been filmed three times, once as a silent feature and twice for television. It has also been adapted for the stage, most notably in a production in the 1960s by the 69 Theatre Company in Manchester with Vanessa Redgrave as Gwendolen Harleth.

Plot summary

Daniel Deronda is two intertwined tales united by the title character. Deronda was raised by a wealthy man, Sir Hugo Mallinger, but his relationship to the man is ambiguous; Deronda is widely believed to be his illegitimate son, though Sir Hugo never says so. He becomes attracted to the beautiful, arrogant and willful Gwendolen Harleth, whose family experiences a reversal of fortune shortly after the novel begins. In order to save herself from becoming an impoverished governess, Gwendolen marries the wealthy but cruel and depraved Henleigh Grandcourt, despite having promised his mistress (Lydia Glasher) she would not do so.

One of the Jewish people Daniel meets is a consumptive visionary named Mordecai, whose passion is for Jewish people to retain their national identity and one day to be restored as a nation. Because he is dying, he wants Daniel to become his intellectual heir and pursue his dream. In spite of being strongly drawn to Mordecai, Deronda hesitates to commit himself to a cause that seems to have no connection to his own identity. Deronda's desire to embrace Mordecai's vision becomes the stronger when they discover that Mordecai is the brother whom Mirah has been seeking. (Their mother has died during Mirah's years abroad.)

Gwendolen, meanwhile, has become emotionally crushed by her cruel, manipulative husband, as well as feeling horror for causing Lydia Glasher's children by Grandcourt to be disinherited. When Henleigh Grandcourt is drowned during a trip abroad, Gwendolen is consumed with guilt for wanting him dead and hesitating to help him--in contrast to Deronda's saving of Mirah from a similar fate. Gwendolen hopes for a future with Deronda, but he instead urges her onto a path of righteousness in which she will help others in order to alleviate her own suffering.

Deronda is on the spot to give Gwendolyn advice because he has traveled to Italy to finally meet his mother, who is terminally ill. He learns that he is actually the legitimate son of a famous opera singer Sir Hugo was in love with. She explains that she was the daughter of a rabbi, and forced to marry another religious Jew, despite her hatred for the rigid piety of her traditional Jewish roots; Daniel was a product of that union. At the death of that husband, she entreated the devoted Sir Hugo to raise her son as an English gentleman, never to know that he is Jewish. Upon learning of his true origins, Deronda tells Mirah of his love for her, and they are married. Daniel commits himself to be Mordecai's disciple, and shortly after their marriage, Mordecai dies with Daniel and Mirah at his side. The married couple then begin a journey to Palestine to investigate what they can do to restore the Jewish people to a nationality.

Gwendolyn is disappointed at Deronda's placing himself out of her reach, but true to his guidance she resolves to live unselfishly. She sends him a letter on his wedding day, telling him not to think of her with sadness but to know that she will be a better person for having known him.

(From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, the Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series, Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18202-1291 is a Portable Document File produced as part of an ongoing student publication project to bring classical works of literature, in English, to free and easy access of those wishing to make use of them.

Cover Design: Jim Manis
Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, ‘mid the throng of hurrying desires
That trample on the dead to seize their spoil,
Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
As exhalations laden with slow death,
And o’er the fairest troop of captured joys
Breathes pallid pestilence.

BOOK I THE SPOILED CHILD
CHAPTER I

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.

WAS SHE BEAUTIFUL or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?

She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda’s mind was occupied in gambling: not in the open air under a southern sky, tossing coppers on a ruined wall, with rags about her limbs; but in one of those splendid resorts which the enlightenment of ages has prepared for the same species of pleasure at a heavy cost of guilt mouldings, dark-toned color and chubby nudities, all correspondingly heavy—forming a suitable condenser for human breath belonging, in great part, to the highest fashion, and not easily procurable to be breathed in elsewhere in the like proportion, at least by persons of little fashion.

It was near four o’clock on a September day, so that the atmosphere was well-brewed to a visible haze. There was deep stillness, broken only by a light rattle, a light chink, a small sweeping sound, and an occasional monotone in French, such as might be expected to issue from an ingeniously constructed automaton. Round two long tables were gathered two serried crowds of human beings, all save one having their faces and attention bent on the tables. The one exception was a melancholy little boy, with his knees and calves simply in their natural clothing of epidermis, but for the rest of his person in a fancy dress. He alone had his face turned toward the doorway, and fixing on it the blank gaze of a bedizened child stationed as a masquerading advertisement on the platform of an itinerant show, stood close behind a lady deeply engaged at the roulette-table. ...

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