Daniel Deronda by George EliotMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I struggled over several months to read this very long book by George Eliot, one of my favourite authors. However, Daniel Deronda will certainly not be a favourite novel of hers, unlike Middlemarch, Silas Marner or The Mill on the Floss. I found parts of the novel to be very slow and ponderous, as well as confusing. The two main characters, Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth, are brought together at the start of the book, but their own particular stories are soon described separately and in great detail.
Gwendolen’s life as a beautiful, self-centred young woman from an impoverished family, who is seeking both power and wealth, is interesting and intriguing. She reminded me of the kind of heroines you may have met in the novels of Jane Austen or W M Thackeray. The story of her disastrous marriage to Henleigh Grandcourt, a pompously boring nobleman, is yet another example of the terrible mistakes so many ‘society women’ of those times made, or were unfortunately cajoled into by their uncompromising families.
To begin with Daniel Deronda appears to be seeking the truth about his own ancestry, having been brought up by Sir Hugo Mallinger. He was Deronda’s guardian, a man who is both confident and polite and constantly encouraging him to take his place in English gentrified society. Despite Deronda’s generous, intelligent and empathetic understanding of others around him he seems incapable of finding enough confidence in his own position. When he wanders into the world of Judaism, rubbing shoulders with Mordecai and Ezra, a whole new set of tales begin to emerge for the reader.
The author does attempt to twist the tales of Gwendolen and Daniel together when they show signs of attempting to escape from their lot, from their respective places in society. George Eliot goes into great detail at this point. For me the one thing she illustrated so well was the prejudice, racism and general elitism of the Victorian times during the growth of the British Empire. Without going into detail I found the end of this epic novel quite disappointing. Probably it could comfortably lose about a third of Daniel Deronda’s tale and become a more engaging and enjoyable book. But then I think it would need quite a different title. Overall, Gwendolen was a more likeable and real character of those times but not really given enough space compared to Daniel. And Daniel was much too weak and wishy-washy for me. In the end he was a man who typically behaved too unsympathetically towards Gwendolen after all.
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