Daniel Deronda

Author: George Elliot

In another world and another time this story takes you to the brilliance between classes and culture, with striking beauty and detail of the male and female characters. Daniel, a handsome young man who is thrown into the lives of two women who want him, struggles with the mystery of his past that pulls him and the comfort of a caring wealthy man who adopted him and offers him a perfect future.

‘I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else,’ wrote George Eliot of her last novel Daniel Deronda, published in 1876. Daniel Deronda opens with one of the most memorable encounters in fiction that are rumored to be based on the life of a close friend of the author’s. Lovely Gwendolen Harleth, alluring yet unsettling, is poised at the roulette-table in Leubronn, where she loosing her hand while being observed by dark and handsome Daniel Deronda. Daniel, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of the English upper-classes, finds himself searching for his true path in life.

While beautiful blonde Gwendolen becomes trapped in an oppressive marriage, a series of twists and dramatic encounters draws Deronda to further pursue his past. And a question comes out of the shadows that leads to a mysterious Italian Countessa who is Jewish. As remote as Gwendolen’s comfort in the country may seem from the world of dark haired beauty Mirah, the lost girl who also has deep feelings for Daniel Deronda, then enters Mordecai, a mystical sort of visionary, running a book shop in the poorest parts of London.

Author, George Eliot weaves these strands of her plot intimately together, daring the readers of Adam Bede and Middlemarch to open their eyes to areas of experience wholly new to the Victorian novel.

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