Daniel Deronda

A beautiful woman who wants only pleasure. A young man who discovers he is Jewish. And the novel that scandalized Victorian England.

George Eliot's final novel is her most daring, a book that dares to ask what we owe to our own happiness and what we owe to our people.

Gwendolen Harleth is dazzling, selfish, and desperate to escape poverty. She marries the wealthy, sadistic Grandcourt—knowing he has a mistress and children. She hates him. She wishes him dead. When he drowns, she may or may not have saved him. Daniel Deronda, the novel's other hero, is a young man raised as an English gentleman, who discovers that he is Jewish. He falls in love with a Jewish woman, Mirah, and dedicates his life to the Zionist cause. The two stories barely touch. Gwendolen's is a tragedy of failed character; Deronda's is a romance of discovered identity. Eliot forces her readers to ask: Which story matters more—the one about a woman who cannot be good, or the one about a man who cannot be anything but good?

This is Eliot at her most ambitious and controversial: a novel about anti-Semitism, feminine ambition, and the limits of sympathy. Daniel Deronda was attacked by critics who called it "un-English" and "too Jewish." It is now recognized as a pioneering work of Jewish literature and a profound study of the choices that make us who we are.

• George Eliot's final novel, published in 1876

• One of the first novels in English to feature a sympathetic Jewish protagonist and to advocate for Jewish nationalism

• The character of Gwendolen Harleth is one of Eliot's most complex and unforgettable creations

Available in multiple formats:

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A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears—or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the hardest choice is between who you are and who you might become.

About the Author

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), one of the leading novelists of the Victorian era. Born in Warwickshire, she was the daughter of a mill manager. She was deeply religious as a young woman but later rejected her faith, translating controversial works of biblical criticism. She moved to London, became the assistant editor of The Westminster Review, and entered into a scandalous unmarried partnership with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, who encouraged her to write fiction. Daniel Deronda was her last novel, published in 1876. It was her most controversial work: critics attacked its depiction of Jewish life and its apparent endorsement of Zionism. Eliot had studied Judaism intensively before writing the novel, consulting rabbis and Hebrew scholars. The novel's portrait of Gwendolen Harleth is thought to be influenced by Eliot's own struggles with ambition and morality. Her other major works include Adam Bede(1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1871–72). She died in 1880, just months after marrying John Walter Cross, a man twenty years her junior. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London.