Daniel Deronda centres around several characters. It relates to an intersection of Jewish and Gentile society in 19th century England. With references to Kaballah, Jewish identity and the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel. Gwendolen Harleth a spoiled but poised and spirited of a family of recently impoverished English gentry enters into a loveless marriage for money, with the cold Mr Grandcourt., but soon sickens of his emotional sadism. The novel centres around Gwendolen as much as it does around Daniel Deronda. It takes us through the lives of both major character's pasts ., before joining the two narratives into the present so to speak.
Daniel Deronda is the adopted son of an English aristocrat, with who Gwendolyn falls in love. Deronda rescues the beautiful Jewish actress and singer Mirah Lapidoth from suicide by drowning, introducing us to another interesting and endearing character. He then becomes intimately involved with the society of English Jewry.
Deronda later discovers his Jewish birth from his dying mother who was the daughter of a prominent Rabbi, who married her cousin. Deronda's story therefore as that of a Jew brought up as a Gentile aristocrat before discovering his identity and committing himself to the national welfare of his people is partly based on that of Moses.
The book puts some focus, mainly through conversation on the yearning of the Jewish people to return to the Holy Land to rebuild the Jewish Commonwealth. Deronda and Mirah later leave
England to help rebuild the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. This component of the novel has lead some prejudiced bigots, such as the loathsome Edward Said to condemn this 1876 classic as `Zionist propaganda'-an Orwellian charge indeed.
People like Said cannot abide the anything that relates to the right of the Jews to live in and return to their ancient homeland.
At the time of this novel's writing progressives saw the revival of nations and national self-determination as a positive thing. It was only nearly a century later that the nihilistic New Left in a sick and bizarre twist began to label the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland as an act of `colonialism'.

4.5 stars but I'm rounding up. This was not quite as good as Middlemarch but it was close. Gwendolen is an absolutely fascinating character. She drove me crazy at times but she was great.

It seems an impertinence to give a star rating to a work by George Eliot: the vastness of her mind and her literary ambition always mock such reductiveness. I find rating particularly challenging with Daniel Deronda because I’m torn between an awareness of flaws in the storytelling and a deep, abiding affection for the titular hero.

Daniel Deronda grows up the ward of a bluff-and-hearty baronet who loves him but causes him distress by concealing the truth of Deronda’s parentage. Daniel is left to believe that he is the baronet’s unacknowledged bastard, which makes him somewhat diffident and neurotic. Being comfortably off compounds the difficulty, allowing him to drift into an amiable purposelessness in his early adulthood.

His story alternates with that of Gwendolen Harleth, an attractive young woman who has grown up on the knife edge of gentility, but with a self-confident egotism that carries her much farther in society than her means and background would imply. She is almost cartoonishly self-absorbed; the two characters could not be more opposite.

When they finally cross paths, the attraction is electric—but, this being a George Eliot novel, that attraction is not a prelude to a simple happily-ever-after tale. They do develop a rather intense relationship, but it is more like a codependency of the mind. Meanwhile, Daniel encounters a very different damsel in distress, and rescuing her sends his life spinning down a whole new path. She is Jewish—still an invidious status in Victorian society—and Daniel’s search for her people becomes a moral and spiritual journey of self-discovery and the belonging he craves.

Gwendolen, meanwhile, has reverses of her own and makes choices that lead her into disaster, from which she repeatedly turns to Daniel for help. He feels compelled to come to her aid, which complicates his life and threatens to derail his new sense of direction.

The book is constructed in a series of symmetrical oppositions that give it a pleasing structure but occasionally force the plot into a place that feels artificial. Eliot is earnestly determined to shatter stereotypes of Jewishness that the snobbery of English gentility allow to thrive, but that earnestness leads her to create some characters who can’t escape a certain woodenness. Nevertheless, I so adored the character of Daniel that I hung on her every word, even when her words proliferated beyond all reason. To a person whose literary sensibilities were trained on Jane Austen, George Eliot is often unforgivably prolix, but Daniel helped me enjoy this novel more than most Eliots I have read.

This took me a while to get through! There were parts of it I really enjoyed, and I made it to the end because it has so many ideas that I’m sure were ahead of their time. One of the two main themes is marriage and how women are treated both as wives and lovers, and the reasons women marry, rarely for love it seems. The other major theme is antisemitism. But oh is Eliot longwinded about it all! I found the main characters interesting and enjoyed the plot, just it could’ve been much shorter and then it would’ve been a better reading experience for me.