Daniel Deronda is a novel by English author George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), first published in eight instalments from February to September 1876. It was the last novel she completed and the only one set in the Victorian society of her day. The work's mixture of social satire and moral searching, along with its sympathetic rendering of proto-Zionist ideas, has made it a final statement from one of the most renowned Victorian novelists.
The novel has been adapted for film three times, once as a silent feature and twice for television. It has also been adapted for the stage, notably in the 1960s by the 69 Theatre Company in Manchester with Vanessa Redgrave cast as the heroine Gwendolen Harleth.
The novel's plot has two strands. One is the "story of Gwendolen", which has been called "one of the masterpieces of English fiction", while the other, which is concerned with Daniel Deronda, has been described as "flat and unconvincing".
Contents
Plot
Daniel Deronda contains two parallel narratives that are united by the title character. The novel begins in September 1865 with the meeting of Daniel and Gwendolen Harleth in the fictional town of Leubronn, Germany. Daniel finds himself attracted to, but wary of, the beautiful, stubborn, and selfish Gwendolen, whom he sees losing all her winnings in a game of roulette. The next day, Gwendolen receives a letter from her mother telling her that the family is financially ruined and asking her to come home. Gwendolen pawns a necklace and debates gambling again to make her fortune. However, her necklace is returned to her by a porter, and she realises that Daniel had seen her pawn the necklace and had redeemed it for her. From this point, the plot breaks off into two separate flashbacks; one gives us Gwendolen's history and the other Daniel's.
In October 1864, soon after the death of Gwendolen's stepfather, Gwendolen and her family move to a new neighborhood. There she meets Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, a taciturn and calculating man who proposes marriage shortly after their first meeting. At first she is open to his advances, but upon discovering that Grandcourt has several children with his mistress, Lydia Glasher, she eventually flees to the German town where she meets Daniel. This portion of the novel sets Gwendolen up as a haughty and selfish, yet affectionate, daughter admired for her beauty but suspected by many in society because of her satirical observations and somewhat manipulative behaviour. She is also prone to fits of terror that shake her otherwise calm and controlling exterior.
Daniel has been raised by a wealthy gentleman, Sir Hugo Mallinger. Daniel's relationship to Sir Hugo is ambiguous, and it is widely believed, even by Daniel, that he is Sir Hugo's illegitimate son, though no one is certain. Daniel is an intelligent and compassionate young man who cannot quite decide what to do with his life, and this is a sore point between him and Sir Hugo, who wants him to go into politics. One day in late July 1865, as he is boating on the Thames, Daniel rescues a young Jewish woman, Mirah Lapidoth, from attempting to drown herself. He takes her to the home of some of his friends, where they learn that Mirah is a singer. She has come to London to search for her mother and brother after running away from her father, who had kidnapped her when she was a child and had forced her into an acting troupe. She finally ran away from him after discovering that he had pledged her in marriage to a wealthy patron. Moved by her tale, Daniel undertakes to help her look for her mother (who turns out to have died years earlier) and brother; through this, he is introduced to London's Jewish community. Mirah and Daniel grow closer and Daniel, anxious about his growing affection for her, leaves for a short time to join Sir Hugo in Leubronn, where he and Gwendolen first meet.
Characters
Daniel Deronda – The ward of the wealthy Sir Hugo Mallinger and hero of the novel, Deronda has a tendency to help others at a cost to himself. At the start of the novel, he has failed to win a scholarship at Cambridge because of his focus on helping a friend, has been travelling abroad, and has just started studying law. He often wonders about his birth and whether or not he is a gentleman. As he moves more and more among the world-within-a-world of the Jews of the novel he begins to identify with their cause in direct proportion to the unfolding revelations of his ancestry. Eliot used the story of Moses as part of her inspiration for Deronda. As Moses was a Jew brought up as an Egyptian who ultimately led his people to the Promised Land, so Deronda is a Jew brought up as an Englishman who ends the novel with a plan to do the same. Deronda's name presumably indicates that his ancestors lived in the Spanish city of Ronda, prior to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.
Gwendolen Harleth – The beautiful, spoiled daughter of a widowed mother. Much courted by men, she is flirtatious but ultimately self-involved. Early in the novel, her family suffers a financial crisis, and she is faced with becoming a governess to help support herself and her family. Seeking an escape, she explores the idea of becoming an actress and singer, but Herr Klesmer tells her that she has started too late, that she does not know the meaning of hard work, training, and sacrifice. Gwendolen marries the controlling and cruel Henleigh Grandcourt, although she does not love him. Desperately unhappy, she seeks help from Deronda, who offers her understanding, moral support and the possibility of a way out of her guilt and sorrow. As a psychological study of an immature egoist struggling to achieve greater understanding of herself and others through suffering, Gwendolen is for many Eliot's crowning achievement as a novelist and the real core of the book. F. R. Leavis famously felt that the novel would have benefited from the complete removal of the Jewish section and the renaming of it as Gwendolen Harleth. It is true that though the novel is named after Deronda, a greater proportion is devoted to Gwendolen than to Deronda himself.
Mirah Lapidoth – A beautiful Jewish girl who was born in England but taken away by her father at a young age to travel the world as a singer. Realising, as a young woman, that her father planned to sell her as a mistress to a European nobleman, to get money for his gambling addiction, she flees from him and returns to London to look for her mother and brother. When she arrived in London she found her old home destroyed and no trace of her family. Giving in to despair, she tries to commit suicide. Rescued by Daniel, she is cared for by his friends while searching for her family and work, so that she can support herself.
The depiction of Jews
Eliot's book was the first novel in English fiction where "Jewish figures were cast in a favorable light, and as nationalists." It contrasted strongly with that of other Victorian novelists, such as Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. Even though Britain had a Jewish-born Prime Minister at the time of the novel's publication (Benjamin Disraeli was baptised as a child into the Church of England after his father renounced Judaism), the view of Jews among non-Jewish Britons at the time was often prejudiced, sometimes to the point of derision or revulsion. In 1833 when the Jewish Civil Disabilities Bill came before Parliament the whole force of the Tory Party and the personal antagonism of King William IV was against the bill, which is reflected in opinions expressed by several of the non-Jewish Meyrick family in Chapter 32.
Influence on Jewish Zionism
On its publication, Daniel Deronda was immediately translated into German and Dutch and was given an enthusiastic extended review by the Austrian Zionist rabbi and scholar David Kaufmann. Further translations soon followed into French (1882), Italian (1883), Hebrew (1893), Yiddish (1900s) and Russian (1902).
Written during a time when Restorationism (similar to 20th-century Christian Zionism) had a strong following, Eliot's novel had a positive influence on later Jewish Zionism. It has been cited by Henrietta Szold, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and Emma Lazarus as having been influential in their decision to become Zionists. According to American novelist Ruchama Feuerman, Lazarus, the Jewish poet of Statue of Liberty fame, became a passionate Zionist after reading Daniel Deronda; it was the go-to novel for budding Zionist leaders, like Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and others; Golda Meir kept the novel near her bed; the book lit a fire under university student Ben-Yehuda who went on to devote his life to reviving ancient Hebrew and shaping it for usage in modern day Israel; and most crucially, Eliot’s novel spurred the first Zionist group of Jews, Hovavei Tzion, to sail to Ottoman Palestine in the 1880s.
Plot structure
In 1948, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition gave the opinion that the Jewish sections of the book were its weakest, and that a truncated version called Gwendolen Harleth should be printed on its own. Conversely, some Zionist commentators have advocated the opposite truncation, keeping the Jewish section, with Gwendolen's story omitted.
Contemporary readers might ask themselves whether the seemingly bifurcated structure of the novel arose from a wish to contrast inward-looking (Gwendolen) and outward-looking (Deronda, on the Jewish 'question') moral growth, with Deronda himself the fulcrum.
Adaptations
Books
An abridged (119 page) version for younger readers, by Philip Zimmerman, focusing on the Jewish elements, was published in 1961 by Herzl Press.
Films
Film adaptations include:
Gwendolin (1914), an American short film directed by Travers Vale.
Daniel Deronda (1921), a British silent drama film starring Reginald Fox, Ann Trevor and Clive Brook. Walter Courtney Rowden made the film at Teddington Studios by Master Films.
Daniel Deronda (1970), a six-episode BBC TV drama written by Alexander Baron, produced by David Conroy and directed by Joan Craft. John Nolan starred as Daniel Deronda, with Martha Henry as Gwendolen and Robert Hardy as Grandcourt.
Daniel Deronda (2002), a four-episode BBC One serial drama written by Andrew Davies, directed by Tom Hooper and starring Hugh Dancy in the title role. The show won two British Academy Television Craft Awards, a Banff Rockie Award, and a Broadcasting Press Guild Award.