In the Library
Daniel Deronda
George Eliot, 1876
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 22 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 70
- Length
- Length 309k words
£1.99
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About the book
At a roulette table in a German spa town, a young man cannot decide if the woman raking in her winnings is beautiful, and the question will not let him go. She is Gwendolen Harleth, clever and vain and terrified of being owned, who marries a man she despises for his name and his diamonds, already knowing of the mistress and children he has cast off to have her. He is Daniel Deronda, raised a gentleman and told nothing of the Jewish mother who bore him and hid what she was, to spare him the life she herself had fled. Grandcourt drowns within sight of his wife, and Gwendolen will never be certain whether she wanted the rope to reach him in time. Deronda sails east afterward, toward a homeland not yet built for a people not yet returned to one. George Eliot's last novel holds a woman's narrow, suffocating self-knowledge against a man's widening into history, and asks you to feel the claustrophobia and the prophecy in the same breath, and believe both.