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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She put her arms on her son’s shoulders at once, and kissed him on both cheeks, then seated herself among her cushions with an air of assured firmness and dignity unlike her fitfulness in their first interview, and told Deronda to sit down by her. He obeyed, saying, “You are quite relieved now, I trust?”
“Yes, I am at ease again. Is there anything more that you would like to ask me?” she said, with the matter of a queen rather than of a mother.
“Can I find the house in Genoa where you used to live with my grandfather?” said Deronda.
“No,” she answered, with a deprecating movement of her arm, “it is pulled down—not to be found. But about our family, and where my father lived at various times—you will find all that among the papers in the chest, better than I can tell you. My father, I told you, was a physician. My mother was a Morteira. I used to hear all those things without listening. You will find them all. I was born amongst them without my will. I banished them as soon as I could.”
Deronda tried to hide his pained feeling, and said, “Anything else that I should desire to know from you could only be what it is some satisfaction to your own feeling to tell me.”
“I think I have told you everything that could be demanded of me,” said the Princess, looking coldly meditative. It seemed as if she had exhausted her emotion in their former interview. The fact was, she had said to herself, “I have done it all. I have confessed all. I will not go through it again. I will save myself from agitation.” And she was acting out that scheme.
But to Deronda’s nature the moment was cruel; it made the filial yearning of his life a disappointed pilgrimage to a shrine where there were no longer the symbols of sacredness. It seemed that all the woman lacking in her was present in him, as he said, with some tremor in his voice,
“Then are we to part and I never be anything to you?”
“It is better so,” said the Princess, in a softer, mellower voice. “There could be nothing but hard duty for you, even if it were possible for you to take the place of my son. You would not love me. Don’t deny it,” she said, abruptly, putting up her hand. “I know what is the truth. You don’t like what I did. You are angry with me. You think I robbed you of something. You are on your grandfather’s side, and you will always have a condemnation of me in your heart.”
Deronda felt himself under a ban of silence. He rose from his seat by her, preferring to stand, if he had to obey that imperious prohibition of any tenderness. But his mother now looked up at him with a new admiration in her glance, saying,
“You are wrong to be angry with me. You are the better for what I did.” After pausing a little, she added, abruptly, “And now tell me what you shall do?”
“Do you mean now, immediately,” said Deronda; “or as to the course of my future life?”
“I mean in the future. What difference will it make to you that I have told you about your birth?”
“A very great difference,” said Deronda, emphatically. “I can hardly think of anything that would make a greater difference.”
“What shall you do then?” said the Princess, with more sharpness. “Make yourself just like your grandfather—be what he wished you—turn yourself into a Jew like him?”
“That is impossible. The effect of my education can never be done away with. The Christian sympathies in which my mind was reared can never die out of me,” said Deronda, with increasing tenacity of tone. “But I consider it my duty—it is the impulse of my feeling—to identify myself, as far as possible, with my hereditary people, and if I can see any work to be done for them that I can give my soul and hand to I shall choose to do it.”
His mother had her eyes fixed on him with a wondering speculation, examining his face as if she thought that by close attention she could read a difficult language there. He bore her gaze very firmly, sustained by a resolute opposition, which was the expression of his fullest self. She bent toward him a little, and said, with a decisive emphasis,
“You are in love with a Jewess.”
Deronda colored and said, “My reasons would be independent of any such fact.”
“I know better. I have seen what men are,” said the Princess, peremptorily. “Tell me the truth. She is a Jewess who will not accept anyone but a Jew. There are a few such,” she added, with a touch of scorn.
Deronda had that objection to answer which we all have known in speaking to those who are too certain of their own fixed interpretations to be enlightened by anything we may say. But besides this, the point immediately in question was one on which he felt a repugnance either to deny or affirm. He remained silent, and she presently said,
“You love her as your father loved me, and she draws you after her as I drew him.”
Those words touched Deronda’s filial imagination, and some tenderness in his glance was taken by his mother as an assent. She went on with rising passion: “But I was leading him the other way. And now your grandfather is getting his revenge.”
“Mother,” said Deronda, remonstrantly, “don’t let us think of it in that way. I will admit that there may come some benefit from the education you chose
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