Daniel Deronda

1876, 1966 Harper Colophon edition
George Eliot
Daniel Deronda
Original price unknown, bought used for $5.95
Somewhat tattered paperback
B-

Eliot's last novel is a denser, more pain-filled book than Silas Marner or Middlemarch.  I used to own Mill on the Floss and Romola, but I enjoyed them less because they were Eliot at her most earnest.  This is somewhere in between.  I do agree with F. R. Leavis's introduction, that Gwendolyn is an achievement and the "Deronda" parts of the novel are weaker, although I disagree that Daniel himself is unbelievable.  Like Rosamond Vincy, Gwendolyn is a spoiled young beauty with a swan-like, or perhaps serpent-like, neck.  Yet, she's always a sympathetic character, even when we don't like her actions or thoughts.  She is self-centred but capable of devotion to her mother and empathy for Grandcourt's mistress and children.  Even when she thinks murderous thoughts of her husband, she does try to save him from drowning. 

As for the "Deronda" thread, while it's interesting to see Zionism portrayed sympathetically by a Victorian Protestant turned Agnostic, I got tired of Mordecai and everything relating to him.  The part about Daniel's search for his identity, including his parentage, intrigued me more.  But his mother's frustration as a female artist makes it seem like there are no good options for women, Gwendolen and Mirah the singer included.  Indeed, even though the story ends in a wedding, it's not at all a happy ending.  On the other hand, there are points, in the first 100 or so pages in particular, that are closer to Eliot's Middlemarch tone of dryness and social observation.

Ironically, she mocks both Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë indirectly.  On p. 65, she observes, "Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach, and will reject the statement as a mere outflow of gall: they will aver that neither they nor their first cousins have minds so unbridled; and that in fact this is not human nature, which would know that such speculations might turn out to be fallacious, and would therefore not entertain them."  This reading I picked up that she was disagreeing that "it's a truth universally acknowledged."  And about 50 pages later she comments on the portrayal of governesses in fiction, clearly invoking Jane Eyre among other works.

This edition has a faux-woodcut look to the front and back covers, so that the people, horses, and manor are filled with circles and straight lines.  It looks very dated, in a 1960s way more than 1870s.