Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (ebook pdf reader for pc .txt) 📕
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Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, was George Eliot’s last novel. It deals with two major characters whose lives intersect: One is a spoiled young woman named Gwendolen Harleth who makes an unwise marriage to escape impending poverty; the other is the titular character, Daniel Deronda, a wealthy young man who feels a mission to help the suffering.
During her childhood Gwendolen’s family was well-off. She lived in comfort and was indulged and pampered. But the family’s fortune is lost through an unwise investment, and she returns to a life of near-poverty, a change which she greatly resents both for herself and for her widowed mother. The only escape seems to be for her to marry a wealthy older man who has been courting her in a casual, unemotional way. The marriage turns out to be a terrible mistake.
Daniel Deronda has been raised by Sir Hugo Mallinger as his nephew, but Daniel has never discovered his true parentage, thinking it likely that he is Sir Hugo’s natural son. This consciousness of his probable illegitimacy moves him to kindness and tolerance towards anyone who is suffering from disadvantage. One evening, while rowing on the river Thames, he spots a young woman about to leap into the water to drown herself. He persuades her instead to come with him for shelter to a family he knows. The young woman turns out to be Jewish, and through his trying to help her find her lost family, Deronda comes into contact with Jewish culture—and in particular with a man named Mordecai, who has a passionate vision for the future of the Jewish race and who sees in Daniel a kindred spirit.
The paths that Gwendolen and Daniel follow intersect often, and Daniel’s kindly nature moves him to try to offer her comfort and advice in her moments of distress. Unsurprisingly, Gwendolen misinterprets Daniel’s attentions.
In Daniel Deronda Eliot demonstrates considerable sympathy towards the Jewish people, their culture, and their aspirations for a national homeland. At the time this was an unpopular and even controversial view. A foreword in this edition reproduces a letter Evans wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, defending her stance in this regard. Nevertheless, the novel was a success, and was translated almost immediately into German and Dutch. It is considered to have had a positive influence on Zionist thinkers.
Daniel Deronda has been adapted both for film and television, with the 2002 B.B.C. series winning several awards.
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- Author: George Eliot
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“Who is Joseph Kalonymos?” said Deronda, with a darting recollection of that Jew who touched his arm in the Frankfort synagogue.
“Ah! some vengeance sent him back from the East, that he might see you and come to reproach me. He was my father’s friend. He knew of your birth: he knew of my husband’s death, and once, twenty years ago, after he had been away in the Levant, he came to see me and inquire about you. I told him that you were dead: I meant you to be dead to all the world of my childhood. If I had said that you were living, he would have interfered with my plans: he would have taken on him to represent my father, and have tried to make me recall what I had done. What could I do but say you were dead? The act was done. If I had told him of it there would have been trouble and scandal—and all to conquer me, who would not have been conquered. I was strong then, and I would have had my will, though there might have been a hard fight against me. I took the way to have it without any fight. I felt then that I was not really deceiving: it would have come to the same in the end; or if not to the same, to something worse. He believed me and begged that I would give up to him the chest that my father had charged me and my husband to deliver to our eldest son. I knew what was in the chest—things that had been dinned in my ears since I had had any understanding—things that were thrust on my mind that I might feel them like a wall around my life—my life that was growing like a tree. Once, after my husband died, I was going to burn the chest. But it was difficult to burn; and burning a chest and papers looks like a shameful act. I have committed no shameful act—except what Jews would call shameful. I had kept the chest, and I gave it to Joseph Kalonymos. He went away mournful, and said, ‘If you marry again, and if another grandson is born to him who is departed, I will deliver up the chest to him.’ I bowed in silence. I meant not to marry again—no more than I meant to be the shattered woman that I am now.”
She ceased speaking, and her head sank back while she looked vaguely before her. Her thought was traveling through the years, and when she began to speak again her voice had lost its argumentative spirit, and had fallen into a veiled tone of distress.
“But months ago this Kalonymos saw you in the synagogue at Frankfort. He saw you enter the hotel, and he went to ask your name. There was nobody else in the world to whom the name would have told anything about me.”
“Then it is not my real name?” said Deronda, with a dislike even to this trifling part of the disguise which had been thrown round him.
“Oh, as real as another,” said his mother, indifferently. “The Jews have always been changing their names. My father’s family had kept the name of Charisi: my husband was a Charisi. When I came out as a singer, we made it Alcharisi. But there had been a branch of the family my father had lost sight of who called themselves Deronda, and when I wanted a name for you, and Sir Hugo said, ‘Let it be a foreign name,’ I thought of Deronda. But Joseph Kalonymos had heard my father speak of the Deronda branch, and the name confirmed his suspicion. He began to suspect what had been done. It was as if everything had been whispered to him in the air. He found out where I was. He took a journey into Russia to see me; he found me weak and shattered. He had come back again, with his white hair, and with rage in his soul against me. He said I was going down to the grave clad in falsehood and robbery—falsehood to my father and robbery of my own child. He accused me of having kept the knowledge of your birth from you, and having brought you up as if you had been the son of an English gentleman. Well, it was true; and twenty years before I would have maintained that I had a right to do it. But I can maintain nothing now. No faith is strong within me. My father may have God on his side. This man’s words were like lion’s teeth upon me. My father’s threats eat into me with my pain. If I tell everything—if I deliver up everything—what else can be demanded of me? I cannot make myself love the people I have never loved—is it not enough that I lost the life I did love?”
She had leaned forward a little in her low-toned pleading, that seemed like a smothered cry: her arms and hands were stretched out at full length, as if strained in beseeching, Deronda’s soul was absorbed in the anguish of compassion. He could not mind now that he had been repulsed before. His pity made a flood of forgiveness within him. His single impulse was to kneel by her and take her hand gently, between his palms, while he said in that exquisite voice of soothing which expresses oneness with the sufferer,
“Mother, take comfort!”
She did not seem inclined to repulse him now, but looked down at him and let him take both her hands to fold between his. Gradually tears gathered, but she pressed her handkerchief against her eyes and then leaned her cheek against his brow, as if she wished that they should not look at each other.
“Is it not possible that I could be near you often and comfort you?” said
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