Daniel Deronda

Meet two extraordinary women: George Eliot, the author of Daniel Deronda, and her character Gwendolen Harleth.

Who is this alluring, modern woman, Gwendolen Harleth?

Daniel Deronda introduces the Jewish characters Herr Klesmer and Mirah Lapidoth in ways that reflect the dilemmas of modern Jewry.

Early in the novel, Gwendolen is badly frightened by a specter of death, but she does not recognize evil when it enters the novel through the figure of Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt.

Brought up as an English gentleman with the paths of scholarship and government open before him, by the end of the novel Daniel Deronda chooses to embrace Judaism and to dedicate himself to Jewish national renewal.

Decades before Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State, George Eliot saw the necessity for the Jewish people to recover their national independence in their ancestral homeland.

George Eliot, who could write powerful essays, regularly chose to present social and political ideas in fictional form.

Daniel Deronda is George Eliot’s great novel of nationalism.