Daniel Deronda: xl (Penguin Classics)

by George Eliot (Author), George Eliot (Author), George Eliot (Author), Terence Cave (Introduction)

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $4.32

  As Daniel Deronda opens, Gwendolen Harleth is poised at the roulette-table, prepared to throw away her family fortune. She is observed by Daniel Deronda, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of the English upper-classes. And while Gwendolen loses everything and becomes trapped in an oppressive marriage, Deronda's fortunes take a different turn. After a dramatic encounter with the young Jewish woman Mirah, he becomes involved in a search for her lost family and finds himself drawn into ever-deeper sympathies with Jewish aspirations and identity. 'I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else', wrote George Eliot of her last and most ambitious novel, and in weaving her plot strands together she created a bold and richly textured picture of British society and the Jewish experience within it.

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.35

  Only in her final novel, in 1876, did George Eliot turn to contemporary English and European life as material for the expression of her own idealism. Daniel Deronda is a psychologically incisive investigation, probing the egoism of a spoiled girl and her increasing awareness of conscience through suffering. Gwendolen comes to regard Daniel as her moral and spiritual mentor, but chance, the revelation of his Jewish birth, and his practical and sympathetic identification with his race draw him away from her. The text is that of Graham Handley's Clarendon edition, which is based on the novel's first published form. emergent nationalism and the bitter internal struggle.

• New

  Paperback
  1996

  $7.25

  With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Carole Jones, freelance writer and researcher. George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), follows the intertwining lives of the beautiful but spoiled and selfish Gwendolene Harleth and the selfless yet alienated Daniel Deronda, as they search for personal and vocational fulfilment and sympathetic relationship. Set largely in the degenerate English aristocratic society of the 1860s, Daniel Deronda charts their search for meaningful lives against a background of imperialism, the oppression of women, and racial and religious prejudice. Gwendolen's attempts to escape a sadistic relationship and atone for past actions catalyse her friendship with Deronda, while his search for origins leads him, via Judaism, to a quest for moral growth. Eliot's radical dual narrative constantly challenges all solutions and ensures that the novel is as controversial now, as when it first appeared.