‘Daniel Deronda’ by George Eliot

I spent much of September wallowing happily in this expansive and fascinating book. It was very enjoyable as well as thought-provoking. ‘Daniel Deronda’ was George Eliot’s last novel. It was published a hundred and fifty years ago this autumn, when she was in her late fifties, very well-established and much admired.

Like Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’, which was appearing in instalments in Russia at almost exactly the same time, the novel’s title slightly misleadingly suggests that the story focuses on the one title character when in fact, for most of the book there are two protagonists and two separate narratives to follow. These only really come together in the final section, making the novel interesting in terms of its structure and perhaps, in its day, somewhat experimental.

On the one hand we have the eponymous Daniel Deronda, who is a delightfully decent, sensitive and well-educated young man. He has been brought up by an ‘uncle’ – a well-off member of the English gentry – but does not, when the narrative starts, know who his real parents are or were. He establishes the truth as the novel proceeds and this turns out to have significant consequences for the denouement.

The second central protagonist is a wonderfully intelligent, rebellious and opinionated young woman called Gwendolen Harleth, who is blessed with an independent spirit that jars against the social conventions of her time. She is expected to marry appropriately, something that initially she resists:

I will not put up with it if it is not a happy state. I am determined to be happy – at least not to go muddling away my life as other people do, being and doing nothing remarkable. I have made my mind not to let other people interfere with me as they have done.

And then, a chapter or two later, as her romantic options narrow somewhat and pressure starts to be applied:

We women can’t go in search of adventures – to find out the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about the plants: they are often bored, and that is the reason why some of them have got poisonous.

Gwendolen is a remarkable literary creation. She is not straightforwardly likeable and George Eliot never tries to make her so. She can be vain, selfish, thoughtless and infuriatingly sure of herself. She is desperately constrained by the limited possibilities available to a woman of her class and financial circumstances, but she is also clever, funny, courageous and very beautiful. . Her character is developed with considerable psychological subtlety, exploring among other things the gap between her ambitions in respect of living an independent life and the need to conform to family expectations.

The two stories then advance very slowly but interestingly as Gwendolen marries and soon learns to regret her decision, while Daniel becomes increasingly drawn towards Judaism and the Jewish community. I suppose that Victorian propriety in respect of discussing circumcision prevented George Eliot from spelling out why exactly so many of his Jewish friends become convinced that he might, in fact, have been born a Jew, but the possibility can certainly be inferred, and the story is more plausible if you do so.

There is though much more to Daniel’s part of the novel than simply the gradual uncovering of his parentage. George Eliot takes Jewish religious belief, history, community and identity extremely seriously, giving them a central place in a major English novel at a time when Jewish characters in fiction were still more often crude stereotypes and outsiders. It was pleasing to read a Victorian novel that did not portray British Jews as crooks or dodgy comic diversions.

I found some of the discussions of Jewish history, religion and identity to be somewhat demanding but also intellectually fascinating. Here George Eliot empathises with a culture and history that were not her own, expressing sympathy with the notion of establishing a new Jewish state in Palestine, and thus giving the book some intriguing historic resonance. She deals with antisemitism thoughtfully too, including consideration of the ways that some European Jews felt social pressure in her time to distance themselves from their faith and community.

There are several equally compelling and colourful secondary characters, some charming and others decidedly not so, whom we get to know along the way, and a variety of satisfying plot twists that kept me happily immersed and turning the pages late into the night. The two narratives never completely separate because Daniel and Gwendolen meet from time to time and establish a friendship, but until the final chapters their experiences vary considerably.

A running theme is the role that chance and luck play in determining what happens to us in our lives. George Eliot signals this theme from the start, opening the narrative in a casino in which Daniel observes Gwendolen gambling somewhat recklessly. In this way she cleverly creates a situation in which she can entirely legitimately introduce coincidences into her narrative in a way that would be a stretch if the story had not already been framed to concern the role played by chance in human life.

But actually, chance is only half of it. George Eliot is interested in the relationship between the circumstances that happen to us and the choices that we make within them. Her characters do not choose their parentage, their social position, the people they happen to encounter or many of the events that alter the course of their lives. They do, however, have to decide what to do next. Chance and moral responsibility consequently sit alongside one another throughout the novel.

There is also the sheer intelligence of the narration. She is endlessly interested in motive and in the stories people tell themselves. She muses on the limits of self-knowledge and on our ability to deceive ourselves when thinking about how others perceive us and about our own futures. She is also very good on the way we reluctantly re-consider our past actions when it is too late and develop regrets. The sections on thought processes such as these are splendid:

But to defer thought in this way was like trying to talk down the singing in her own ears. The thought that is bound up with our passion is as penetrative as air – everything is porous to it; bows, smiles, conversations, repartee, are mere honeycombs where such thought rushes freely, not always with a taste of honey. And without shutting herself up in solitude, Gwendoline seemed at the end of nine or ten hours to have gone through a labyrinth of reflection, in which already the same succession of prospects had been repeated, the same fallacious outlets rejected, the same shrinking from necessities of every course. Already se was undergoing some hardening effect from feeling she was under eyes which saw her past actions solely in the light of her lowest motives.

It is a long book – almost 700 pages in my Oxford World’s Classics edition – and there are a lot of passages in which the author and her characters ruminate at length. This is the antithesis of a pacy pot-boiler. But I found reading it to be terrifically absorbing and rewarding. As often happens when one finishes a really great classic novel, it is hard to read anything else afterwards without finding it, for a while at least, to be a touch trite and trivial.