Daniel Deronda

A new edition of George Eliot’s classic 1876 novel, Daniel Deronda. Her final novel, Daniel Deronda is her only work that was set in the Victorian society of her own day. It opens on the titular character and protagonist, Daniel Deronda, meeting Gwendolen Harleth at a roulette-table in Germany, as she throws away her family fortune at the table. Daniel Deronda, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of the English upper-classes as a ward of the wealthy Sir Hugo Mallinger, is drawn to her and intervenes on her behalf. The novel proceeds, through a series of flashbacks, to tell us the stories of Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth and the events that lead them to this point, before returning to the present time and their current plights. Daniel Deronda himself, through a series of subsequent encounters, finds himself drawn into learning more about his own past and into ever-deeper sympathies with Jewish identity and proto-Zionist thinking. Daniel Deronda is a mixture of social satire and moral searching, making for the final controversial statement of one of Victorian England’s most renowned and acclaimed literary voices. George Eliot, the pen name for Mary Ann Evans (1819 -1880) was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is known for her seven novels, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Most of her works are set in provincial England and are appreciated for their realism, psychological insight, and sense of place. Her novel Middlemarch is considered to be the “greatest novel in the English language” by many critics, and she is named among the most important and influential novelists of her era. Her works have been the subject of numerous TV and film adaptations and remain among the most beloved and critically acclaimed works for all time.