I think George Eliot is becoming a favorite author for me. This is the third book of hers I've read and I absolutely loved it! Eliot's writing is lovely, the way she writes flawed characters is so believable and the way she philosophizing just hits a sweet spot every time. This is my favorite of her novels I've read thus far.

n  The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea.

Gwendolyn had not considered that the desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection[.]

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

He had no idea of a moral repulsion, and could not have believed, if he had been told it, that they may be a resentment and disgust which will gradually make beauty more detestable than ugliness, through exasperation at that outward virtue in which hateful things can flaunt themselves or find a supercilious advantage.n

'Daniel Deronda' is an uncomfortable book, and it will be uncomfortable so long as antisemitism exists. The work posits no questions (where did the hatred for Jewish people come from?) and delivers no answers (how did the fictional scene of casual wishes for antisemitic extermination set the stage for the Shoah?), but instead serves as a marker stone, one of the more prominent in English literature. DD is, as the introduction likes to babble on about, an imperfect work, but much as it doesn't matter if my students get ten questions perfect if the time was allotted for them to do sixty, Evans is working on a higher tier than the vast majority of novelists of both her time, those preceding, and even some of the future. Full of bad faith and undermining that both the introduction and end notes are, the editor does see fit to draw comparisons to Baldwin, who similarly posited neither answers nor solutions to the antiblackness that continues to throttle his questions of origin. Evans' warning is nowhere near as dire, but it is a portrait of warning nonetheless, as with nationalism comes country, and with country comes internationally recognized means of enacting justice. It will take another seven decades after DD for Eichmann to be extradited to Israel, but like any society aware of the hierarchy, the English like their underbelly safely digested in the history books and the scriptures, a people eradicated before a people can come again.

n  Why should a gentleman whose other relations in life are carried on without the luxury of sympathetic feeling, be supposed to require that kind of condiment in domestic life?

[H]e never did choose to kick any animal, because the act of kicking is a compromising attitude, and a gentleman's dog should be kicked for him.

Still, for those who prefer command to love, one does not see why the habit should change precisely at the point of matrimony.n

This novel, more than any other I've encountered, illustrates by slow and steady degrees the concepts of the gendered spheres of influence and their artificially constructed realms of influence. Gwendolyn is the interior by conventional rote, Daniel's is the exterior by comparatively obscene freedom, and the tales told of wives and their husbands have all the reliability of the myth of the American Dream, wherein one is raised through a sacrifice of millions and used as proof of quantitative success. Grandcourt is the pinnacle of English civilization, complete with a surname reminiscent of those countries of Norman conquest, and that place on high births a sadistic, phlegmatic patriarch, replete with dictatorial leisure and socipolitical control so fine one can will understand the origins of Big Brother. As such, this is not a comfortable novel by any means, as it affords men the purest presentation of the powers they may execute and the women the purest experience of how said powers are executed upon them. This is the case for both Christian and Jewish, as the person who wrote in the introduction that all the Jewish are constructed as literal angels never looked at Klemser, or Lapidoth, or Leonora Halm-Eberstein, or any of the minor characters who argued and solicited and otherwise lived their lives in countries that had made plain to them that Jewish people did not and would never belong other than as dissolved and destroyed cultural curiosities to be claimed as heritage by and neoliberal type: the last incremental functioning of a sometimes aggressive, sometimes passive genocide.

n  You are not a woman. You may try — but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out — "this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by fixed recipe.

I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play — grand, with an iron will...But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself.

Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father's will was against it.n

The problem most readers probably have with this book is that there are no sinners and there are no saints; there are only systems and how well the individual survives their intersections. Gwendolyn is a Christian mirror to a Jewish couple, and each woman looks on the other as an object of abject envy while entrapped within their respective patriarchal entrapments. No woman who plays the game ever comes out a saint, and all an author such as Evans can do is tell the truth about such human beings. This is best expressed, much as Tanizaki did with Naomi and Smith with On Beauty, by putting the pathos on the side of the close third person male narrator and the ethos and logos on the side of the little to none embodied yet still powerfully outspoken female side character/narrator obsession. There is nothing cruel or dehumanizing in letting a representative of a demographic whom the author will never be able to truly represent to speak for themselves, and if if the fates of Gwendolyn and other characters do not seem "feminist" (I have to say, 2000 pounds a year now, converted 161k pounds a year now, converted to 223k dollars, isn't bad at all), it is because, once again, feminism is being interpreted as once again stuffing a human being into a complex ideal instead of being allowed to make mistakes, compromise, and survive through the ugly tenacity such systems of gender intersected with religion intersected with historical persecution breeds among their populations. When Evans ended where she did, she had a hope that the life sustaining Jewish tracts of Ezra, replete with all the complications of Jewish human beings such as Leonara, Mirah, and Lapidoth, had outweighed all the casual wishes of extermination espoused by the perfectly bred English type. The English system may permit the Jewish to survive, but such a situation that rendered such permission of utmost necessity should never have existed in the first place.

n  She had only to collect her memories, which proved to her that 'anybody' regarded illegitimate children as more rightfully to be looked shy on and deprived of social advantages than illegitimate fathers.

I can't say that he is not active in imagining what goes on in other people—but then he always imagines it to fit his own inclination.

Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honoured and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep; and all of us in our turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbours do not admire us.n

In the end, there are Jewish people marrying Christian people, despite the accusations of racism (one, race is far too young to meld with such a beast as antisemitism; two, antisemitism has persisted so long as to to formulate a veritable enclave of common DNA, so pardon the wariness of the oppressed and do something about the alt-right/Neo-Nazis kthx), necessary critiques of Evans' portrayals of Judaism (however much the editor attempts to undermine such credible evaluations), and an unwritten half, easy, of a book devoted to further adventures of Gwendolyn Harleth and Daniel Deronda. I wish all authors had been half as brave with their last novel, for to go out on a limb for those with little to no political power, all for the sake of a common humanity, very rarely puts food on the table. This work is, in essence, an antithesis to Tolstoy's rant in W&P's epilogue that the printing press had doomed humanity, but it does not mean DD does not stoop to using lazy metaphors for the sake of narrative impetus, or that it was a gripping ride for every one of its 900 pages. What it means is that it undertakes the dull and demoralizing work of fending off the sea lions and status quo critics and other passively murderous sorts long enough for a stereotype to become flesh and bone and bring hope to those who have been condemned to live in that stereotype for seeming perpetuity. If more authors of the past, which no personal identity stake in the matter), had taken it upon themselves to raise up those who are customarily beaten down, we may never have had a Shoah at all. The evil lies not with the imperfect life, but with the complacency that views both said life and its representations and says, oh well. It will never happen to me.

n  That prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide us far in practice. Mirah's feelings, she tells us, are concerned what is.

Every objection can be answered if you take broad ground enough, Hans: no special question of conduct can be properly settled in that way[.]

[T]here will still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to – which seems to me as bad a superstition or false god as any that has been set up without the ceremonies of philosophising.

To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from a bridge beyond the cornfields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us. n

George Eliot’s tome, Daniel Deronda, was her last novel and it is anything but an easy read. Quite frequently when the narrative began to move and become quite interesting, Eliot would veer off into another direction and leave me champing at the bit to get back to the story.

Having recently read Middlemarch, I couldn’t help feeling that these characters were all pale and colorless next to those I had just left behind. The character, Daniel Deronda, was a particular puzzle to me, with reactions that did not seem to be realistic and too much of an effort to make him a type instead of an individual. Perhaps I was just too worn out with his “goodness” to really like him. Gwendolen was understandable and flawed enough to make up for it. She was both interesting and represented the most growth and change through the course of the novel.

I started this novel with a pretty serious dislike of Gwendolen, the spoiled girl, but by the end of the novel my attitude toward her had softened. I saw her as a bit of a Hardy character, caught in the awareness of her faults, without any avenue for correcting them or atoning for her sins. Without giving anything of the plot away, I cannot help admiring her resistance of giving in to the basest reaction to her situation. At the last, I think she was much harder on herself than I would have been inclined to be.

Obviously, much of the purpose of this novel is to address the place of Jewish customs and society in 19th Century Europe. Eliot appears to have some very strong feelings about the maintenance of the Jewish people as a separate identity vs. the efforts to absorb them into the Christian society, with the loss of their own specific religion, customs and heritage. I could not help reading this novel with an eye toward what came later, the holocaust and the rise of the Jewish State. I was very interested in what I saw as the struggle to understand Jews and admit them to be on equal standing with their peers. I wonder what kind of reception this got at the time it was written.

Although I recognized Eliot’s purpose being to explain and perhaps endear us to the Jewish characters, they were the characters I could least understand. Mordecai’s almost paranormal recognition of Daniel as a like soul, Mirah’s perfection (along with Daniel’s), and the coldness of Daniel’s mother make them seem less accessible. And, she cannot resist bringing in some of the oldest and most cliched stereotypes when dealing with the Cohens...the typical Jewish family.

I did find this passage from Daniel’s mother very interesting:

”Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father’s will was against it. My nature gave me a charter.”

We are confronted with the idea that a career and motherhood cannot exist side-by-side. She is the bold woman who chooses the career. She hasn’t a speck of motherly feeling. She is painted throughout the entire episode as cold and unnatural. Superwoman had not yet been invented.

While I did find this a worthy read, it cannot live up to the precedents set by Middlemarch and Mill on the Floss to my mind. I had scheduled it to read in 2015 and had to push it over to 2016, so it feels like a personal accomplishment to have it behind me. I will be thinking about it for some time, I am sure and it may be one of those novels that grows in importance as it settles on my mind.

I considered giving this book 4 stars (also 3, also 5, also 2) but it seems all wrong. 4 stars is “good” or “great, but…” and this book is more “brilliant, BUT…” that but being quite a loaded one. I will say that I was not bored.

If you’re reading this, you probably know the general idea: a two-pronged, occasionally-intersecting story following Gwendolen Harleth, who marries for money and lives to regret it, and Daniel Deronda, a young English gentleman who rescues a Jewish woman from drowning and becomes drawn into an intense interest with Jewish culture and identity.

I am by far not the first person to think these stories make odd bedfellows; practically everyone has said so. I spent long swathes of the book wondering why for God’s sake, Eliot chose to do it this way. Somehow, in the final pages, this element finally came together and worked for me. I understand why it had to be this way, and I feel, actually, it’s such a revolutionary thing she’s done structurally. The novel, finally, seems to undermine the Victorian novel itself, which seems a fitting thing for the final work of a woman who is more or less synonymous with the Victorian novel.

That still leaves quite a few execution fumbles throughout the book. And it’s maddening, because for everything done poorly, there’s an example elsewhere of the same thing done well, and if she had just stayed the course this would be an absolutely brilliant book, no buts.

The biggest problem is characterization. Gwendolen is far and away the most rounded character in the book’s first half. She is part flighty socialite, not quite the most beautiful woman in the room, but the one who melds beauty, energy and supreme self-confidence. She isn’t rich, but she believes she was made for great things. There are some darker strands hidden among this display: she hates the thought of getting married, is physically repelled by it, at one point bursting out that she cannot stand to be made love to. Combined with her frequent stated dislike for her dead stepfather, this made me suspect she had been abused as a child (this is speculation, but I think it’s supported by the text). Overall, Gwendolen feels very modern, but she is trapped in a 19th century novel, and after the family loses their money, not marrying is a luxury she can’t afford.

She marries Grandcourt, a wealthy aristocrat who on the surface seems to repel her less than other men, but she marries him knowing that by doing so she disinherits other people with a prior claim – and the reader knows that Grandcourt is an ice-cold sadist and manipulator. Early scenes between Grandcourt and his manservant Lush are delightfully menacing, and give a taste of what poor Gwendolen can expect.

And Gwendolen suffers accordingly, but the book goes off the rails here and Eliot commits the classic creative writing class sin of telling rather than showing (I am no fan of these “rules” of creative writing, but it was indisputably less fun to read about how Gwendolen hated life because her husband was a beast, rather than seeing his particular form of beastliness in action as in the earlier scenes with Lush).

Meanwhile, Deronda, a young man of unknown parentage, rescues a young Jewish woman, Mirah, from drowning and goes in search of her missing relatives, throwing him into a previously unknown world of Jewish culture in London. Deronda is a decent-enough character, with early chapters describing both his talents and his general rootlessness, his inability to find a cause to anchor his life to, beyond the general cause of listening to young ladies tell him their sorrows. We meet Mordecai, a dying Jewish scholar who has been waiting for a young man to carry on his work – but Deronda is not Jewish. Nonetheless, he appears to Mordecai rowing up the Thames out of the sunset like a vision in a dream.

Fine. BUT. The Jewish characters are dreadfully boring. There’s a strong whiff of Eliot writing against the prevailing prejudices of the day, to show Jews as moral, as upright, as educated, as demure. Unfortunately she has failed to make them human. It is quite a bit like reading about Black people written by a white author who doesn’t really know many Black people, but who wants to make statements about racism.

Deronda and Gwendolen interact – good! But Gwendolen, consumed by guilt, wants Deronda to help make her over as a good and moral person. Sadly, the “better” Gwendolen becomes, the less she seems alive on the page.

Deronda decides to dedicate his life to Zionism. This is not a topic I can muster much enthusiasm for, which is one reason I haven’t read this book until now (and in fact currently my sympathy for Mordecai’s way of thinking is at an all-time low).

And yet, throughout, there continue to be some absolutely masterful scenes, interspersed with some decidedly less masterful scenes. There are some excellent character sketches mounted in very few pages which recall the expansive humanism of Middlemarch. There is a family of girls who love yet bicker with their brother in a way that feels instantly familiar. There is a mother who rages against the constraints of motherhood and of marriage, who has resolutely cut ties to chart her own path (and who has ended up trapped anyway, yet unrepentant). There are satirical portraits and some very dark undercurrents. There is water, drowning, there is European history in all of Eliot’s characteristic detail.

It's a fascinating book. It’s no Middlemarch though.

George Eliot is an author whose intellectual prowess and craft I can't but envy. Daniel Deronda is not an easy read, but it's such an interesting book and so unlike anything I have read from this period, I'm honestly gobsmacked how she got away with it.

My sister wrote her senior thesis on this book, so I figured if I was going to stand half a chance at understanding but a quarter of that thesis, I would have to read it. Still haven’t gotten to the thesis (80 pages Ak?! C’mon!), but I did finally polish off the book, and am not sorry that I did. Much like Middlemarch this book is packed with long, intricate, sometimes movingly ornate, oftentimes completely hilarious (and not in a self-conscious way), frequently ultranerdy sentences that somehow seem even more absurdly arcane/wonderful than other 19th century Brits. If Austen fired a word pistol, Elliot preferred the lexical two-decker broadside.

As with Middlemarch, Patrick O’Brian and Jane Austen did not prepare me to fully interpret a book of Deronda’s sweep and complexity, so my only real point of reference is Middlemarch itself. Like the characters in that book, most of the protagonists in Deronda struggle with deliberately crafting their own lives, but unlike the focus on vocation in Middlemarch, these characters seemed more concerned with morality. Deronda himself wasn’t seeking a job so much as a crusade, and Gwen spent almost the entire book watching her ego eroded by both circumstance and her husband only to find she barely even knew what good meant if it couldn’t mean pleasing herself. I suspect the fact that many of the protagonists had lost parents plays into this somehow, perhaps severing them from strong religious and cultural norms and forcing the characters to question and then assert moral positions. The Meyricks, the Gascoignes, Grandcourt, and perhaps Sir Hugo rarely seemed to question their own codes, whereas Gwen and Dan were constantly revisiting them. I guess that falls a part a bit with Mordecai and Mirah, but perhaps we just met Mordecai long after he’d settled many of these internal debates (he certainly had a code, albeit a long-winded possibly delusional one).

Ultimately I found Gwen to be the most interesting and appealing character, mostly because I’m a traditionalist and I like it when characters change in profound but believable ways (yes, Ak, I’m am looking forward to reading about how narrative is just a myth Elliot was trying to lay bare with this book, or something, right?), and Gwen went from back-of-the-hand-cackling-anime-villainess to having her will entirely crushed. She was the only appealing character with any wit in the book (I wasn’t a fan of Hans, and Daniel’s mom, while awesome, was really just a guest star). Actually, part of the tragedy for me was seeing that verve brought down not just by Grandcourt’s weird dominance, but also by her submission to Deronda’s moral authority. Gwen’s smart, willful, and clearly possesses the kernel of morality in her love for her mother. Why can’t she figure this shit out herself?!

I found Deronda himself a bit boring. He was always good and always right. Dull. Keeping with the anime theme, he was just sad Pikachu, all the time. The way his constant deliberation always seemed to border on passivity bugged me too. His public attitude was more like Grandcourt's than anyone else’s, even though his inaction was usually due to deliberation rather than indifference.

Anyway, long but good, glad I read it. Bring on the thesis.


Oh, and you know there were words:

prebendary (n): a stipend given to a clergyman from the revenues of a church or cathedral. (p. 33)
fidus Achates: in the Aeneid, Achates was Aeneus's bff. (p. 37)
euphonious (adj): sounding good. (p. 43)
spoony (adj): foolish, silly, particularly when in love. It always drove me nuts that this was in the Scrabble dictionary, but I guess it does have meaning beyond "of or pertaining to a spoon" (p. 58)
antigropelos (n): waterproof leggings for riding or walking, aka spatterdashes. (p. 70)
burthen (n): archaic form of burden, which is pretty obvious, but I don't recall this word coming up so much with other 19th century authors. (p 90 and just about every other page in the book)
monody (n):: a solo lament. (p. 90)

"It was impossible to be jealous of Juliet Fenn, a girl as middling as mid-day market in everything but her archery and her plainness, in which last she was noticeably like her father: underhung and with receding brow resembling that of the more intelligent fishes."

Amazing how cruel and bigoted she could be. Ak tells me she believed in physiognomy. (p. 121)

uncial (n): a form of all-caps (or majuscule) script that is very rounded. Now, what exactly Elliot meant by handwriting "of the delicate kind which used to be esteemed feminine before the present uncial period" I have no idea. Did people write in all-caps all the time in her day?

perrugue (n): alt. form of peruke, which is a man's wig from the 17th and 18th centuries. (p. 179)

"...impaling the three Saracens' heads proper and three bezants of the one with the tower and falcons argent of the other..." Only now that I am looking things up do I realize she was talking about heraldry. Behold, a Saracen's head, bezants, and falcons argent. I was very, very disappointed to learn that Saracens bear no relation to the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants, Sarracenia, which were apparently named after an 18th century botanist named Michel Sarrazin. How does that even work?! (p. 180)

"But for God's sake, keep an English cut, and don't become indifferent to bad tobacco!" Sir Hugo Mallinger's advice to Danny Boy on learning that the latter wishes to go abroad. Another winning epitaph. I'm gonna need, like, 30 graves when I die. (p. 200)

"I could not bear memories any more: I could only feel what was present in me – it was all one longing to cease from my weary life, which seemed only a pain outside the great peace that I might enter into." I found this conclusion to Mirah's autobiography somewhat remarkable for the extent dedicated to her thoughts of suicide. Granted I haven't read that broadly, but I don't recall many 19th century brits dwelling on suicide too much, particularly in protagonists. (p. 241)

"The self-delight with which she had kissed her image in the glass had faded before the sense of futility in being anything whatever – charming, clever, resolute – what was the good of it all?" And in addition to suicide, we have all this depression, not just sadness but an acute sensation of pointlessness. (p. 248)

"Outsiders might have been more apt to think..." This paragraph is just hilarious: essentially about the triumph of personality over physicality, it just descends into this pedantic mess about the Odyssey, which she concludes by admitting that the Odyssey was just a terrible analogy. Oh George Elliot. This whole chapter is just amusing for being the only traditionally romantic passage in the entire book ("I am afraid of nothing but that we should miss the passing of our lives together." Queue the Tchaikovsky). Kind of like she was saying, "Look, I will give you guys one happy romance. One. Ok? But it will only last a single chapter. A short chapter. And I am going to talk about the Odyssey." (p. 259)

chignon (n): style of hair where the hair is tied in a knot or bun at the back of the head or the nape of the neck. Never knew this had a name. Definitely better than "cockernonnie" and "cock-up." (p. 358)

rinderpest (n): viral disease affecting cattle. (p. 360)

"...that mania of always describing one thing while you were looking at another..." My God I hate this, and I am always catching myself about to do it, particularly while eating. The only motivations I can think of are to belittle the present meal, thereby making everyone consider it inferior, or boast about your own taste, both of which seem horrible. (p. 461)

cynosure (n): something that attracts attention. Constantly forgetting this word. (p. 487)

"What sort of earth or heaven would hold any spiritual wealth in it for souls pauperized by inaction?" It seems ridiculous that Deronda would deliver this line, as he is almost entirely inert for half of the book. (p. 499)

persiflage (n): banter (p. 512)

caliginous (adj): misty, dark. (p. 512)

Melusina: a figure in Celtic and northern European legend, beautiful woman above the waist, serpent below, but apparently only on Saturdays. (p. 689)

murrain (n): another infectious cattle disease. (p. 707)

Supralapsarian (n): honestly even after reading the Wikipedia article I have no idea what this really means, and Hans' joke is sadly lost on me. Absurd doctrinal stances like this just make me think of Life of Brian. (p. 712)

Another one that is difficult to review without spoilers, but I'll try.

There are two sort of parallel stories in this. For about 500 pages I thought it would have been better to write two novels, but the stories converge just enough so that separating them would have diminished them both. And diminishing either would have made them close to worthless.

As long as this book is (and the story itsself is 675 pages, not the 712 advertised), each of the storylines is under-developed. Each has very good beginnings and logical endings. It's the middles that leave much to be desired. In the first is a young head strong woman in the character of Gwendolyn Harleth. Will she be able to live always in control of her own life? And in the other is Daniel Deronda, a young man raised with all the advantages but of unknown parentage.

Great so far, but Eliot simply doesn't provide enough foundation for the actions that follow. Too bad because I really like her style.

Eliot is a master of characterization and uses this gift well in exploring two important themes in English society. The first and most unique is that of antisemitism in late 19th Century English life, as well as the beginnings of Zionism. The second theme is altruism vs. egotism. Too verbose and tangential at times, but otherwise a hugely ambitious and successful social novel.

.

I have finished this book and am once again confirmed in my opinion that I am not a fan of George Eliot. Gwendolyn drove me batty with her self-absorption and, while I am sure that the feeling that the Meyricks (and Daniel himself at first) evince about Mirah (that if Mirah would just convert everything would be better & that most Jews are horrid vulgar money-grubbers) is an accurate reflection of the times, it felt incredibly patronizing to me.

Even though I didn't really like this book, I am giving it 3* because the writing is wonderful & the fact that despite my dislike, I really did want to find out what happened.

Wow - what a long haul for a very unsatisfying read (my book had 883 pages!!).
I would have liked to have given it 2 stars because it was just "ok" (I'm not really crazy about this star system), but I went ahead and gave it 3 stars out of respect for George Eliot.
It really was two books kind of squeezed together and that not done very well.
Again, I usually love George Eliot (Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss), but this one was just not very good :/

I read Middlemarch some time ago, not knowing it’s a masterpiece (I never heard about Eliot growing up), “the only English book for adults”, and liked it ok. Then I kept discovering it on the lists of readers’ favorite books. That made me wonder if I missed something and I decided to reread it. I bought a good copy so that nothing would hinder me from enjoying it. And I just couldn’t make myself move past the first page. But then I heard about this book, her last and “the most ambitious” one. Ok, I think to myself, this is my next Eliot.

This is a very very long novel of two very distinct parts. One of them is about a young woman disillusioned with her life and destroyed through her bad marriage. (And the badness of the marriage is mostly explained to us, not much shown). The other one is about the titular character's self-discovery and falling in love with the idea of proto-Zionism.

And they are both weak, preachy, moralizing and boring. Well, Gwendolen's part started out fantastic, the menacing atmosphere of her every scene of sparring for power with her future husband were beautifully crafted, the suspense, the psychological intricacies of every move, gesture. Unfortunately Eliot gave up and gave us the most unsatisfying resolution of that subplot, the only good subplot. The part about Judaism was so uninspired, filled by characters who were just avatars of the archetype: a beautiful young Jewish woman destined to be a good Jewish wife for a Jewish husband; a man who lives for his ideas; both of them are the most enlightened human beings to teach English characters around him that not all Jews are pawnbroker, and some have beautiful noses (the lowlier Jews didn't escape the profession or the nose). I am not criticizing her, she's a woman of her time and this book is full of empathy towards Jewish people. What I am trying to say is that I am not a woman of her time and I am not a scholar of Judaism in Victorian England.

And after reading The Mill on the Floss and this one, I'm positive the woman can’t finish her novel for the life of her.

And if I’m understanding correctly, Eliot sees every marriage as a power struggle where a woman must lose for it to be a happy one. Or more like to be a meek submissive doting one from the start. If you’re a strong woman, you’re doomed.

Will I ever reread Middlemarch? I don’t know. Was this book a waste of my reading time? Yes. The good was just too rare and the banal, moralistic aplenty.

n  THE DIPTYCHn

This novel was renewed my interest on how George Eliot wrote. I am highly tempted to read more about her and approach literary evaluations of her writing, but before I do so I want to read Adam Bede and Silas Marner and may be reread The Mill on the Floss.

When I read Romola I considered GE’s cosmopolitanism and breath of knowledge. These elements are also present in Daniel Deronda but with an added edge. With Middlemarch it was the role of the narrator and the clear presence of the author that attracted me. In DD the voice of the writer is also clear but in less authorial fashion and, one suspects, speaking more often through her characters. What struck me most, and want to select for my review this time, is the structure of the novel.

It is clearly divided in two. Clearly a diptych. Already MM seemed to me to consist of two parallel stories joined somewhat seamlessly in the middle. The study of provincial evolved around two foci, the doctor Lydgate and the illuminated Dorothea. Both idealists. The twists and turnings of the plot, however, managed to link the two stories creating a middle path in Middlemarch were these two different versions of dreamers confronted each other and helped each other in correcting their reflections.

This double structure is again present in Daniel Deronda, GE’s last novel, but with a wider gap between the two panels. With almost separated frames the novel reads like a double portrait, or a diptych with two facing and complementary donors searching for an object of adoration that is however missing – for the Self is never in the other.

The two subjects pursue their mirroring images and transverse their separating frames by engaging in dialogs and verbal encounters. The twists and turns of the plot this time do not fuse their separated worlds. Only their minds bridge the gap.

Generally I do not discuss characters in my reviews, but I can't avoid it this time. In this novel, the two protagonists, the sitters in the double portrait, baffled me. Gwendolen (Gwen), potentially a highly irritating young woman, fascinated me because I thought she was such a modern character. I expected that young powerful women in today’s professional world, and who are not just capable and intelligent, but also beautiful—and I am thinking of top Wall street traders, or international lawyers of the type, of for example, Amal Aladdin--, must have a similar self-assurance and defiance and inner drive and independence and élan as Gwen. But even if these contemporary women have had a better chance to explore and exploit their abilities in their chosen fields of excellence than GE has allowed Gwen, she did not get on my nerves. I was enthralled by her modernity.

Daniel, in spite of having claimed the title of the novel, remained for me an equivocal figure. It is almost as if in my diptych Daniel—with his messianic role turned around, for he is the Christian leading onto the Jewish— is a donor who through a process of transubstantiation has become the object of adoration.

And in that transformation, the novel dims and blurs its cast of characters and becomes more and more an exploration of ideas, spirituality and politics, with a defence of Judaism and a daring proposal of Zionism.

In all this Daniel emerges as an ethereal saviour but poor Gwen succumbs and loses her leading edge.

And that is what made me wonder about how GE wrote her books and planned her work in her mind.

Did she spend half of her day doing intellectual research on the subjects that captivated her and did she then transcribe her reading into her novel in the afternoons? What was her true objective, to expand her erudition, or to mould it into something else?

I will have to put aside my curiosity for a while and continue reading her work, but with her intelligent writing and formidable abilities she certainly makes me ponder about the process of writing, that elusive act - creativity. How is it born and how does it live?


And how did Rothko paint the above diptych?