Daniel Deronda

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Product Description Daniel Deronda , by George Eliot , is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics : All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. qaodmasdkwaspemas0ajkqlsmdqpakldnzsdfls George Eliot ’s last, most ambitious novel, Daniel Deronda aroused scandal when it first appeared in 1876. What begins as a passionate love story takes a surprising turn into the hidden world of the early Zionist movement in Victorian England. The story opens memorably at a roulette table, where we first meet the young and idealistic Daniel Deronda and the enchanting Gwendolen Harleth—whom many critics consider to be George Eliot’s finest creation. Although the two are immediately drawn to one another, Gwendolen—outwardly alluring and vivacious, inwardly complex and unsettled—is forced by circumstance into an oppressive marriage with the harsh aristocratic Henleigh Grandcourt. Deeply unhappy, she turns for friendship to Daniel, only to discover his involvement with Mirah Lapidoth, a talented young Jewish woman. Torn between his devotion to Gwendolen and his passion for Mirah and the plight of her people, Daniel is forced to look at his own mysterious past and find out who he really is—and who he wants to become. Earl L. Dachslager is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Houston and an adjunct professor in the University’s Distant Education Program. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland. He reviews books regularly for the Houston Chronicle . Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Earl Dachslager’s Introduction to Daniel Deronda In itself, Daniel Deronda ’s position as Eliot’s last novel lends it some significance, but, far more important, Daniel Deronda represents Eliot’s summing up, the book in which she hoped to bring together all the values, ideals, and beliefs that had informed her earlier work. In short, Daniel Deronda was not simply Eliot’s final novel, it was her final letter to the world. That she herself was aware that Daniel Deronda was her fictional finale is made clear from her notes and letters. She recorded in her diary for December 31, 1877 (her final entry): “But of course as the years advance there is a new rational ground for the expectation that my life may become less fruitful. . . . Many conceptions of works to be carried out present themselves, but confidence in my own fitness to complete them worthily is all the more wanting because it is reasonable to argue that I must have already done my best” (Haight, ed. Selections from George Eliot’s Letters , pp. 493–494 [henceforth, Letters ]; see “For Further Reading”). From the beginning, Eliot’s books cost her an enormous outlay of energy—physical and emotional. Each book brought with it anxiety and the desperate feeling that not only would the book never be completed but also that in the end it would be worthless. She had arrived at the conviction that authors should stop when they had no more to say. But even if she had the energy and desire to write another “big book,” they likely vanished when Lewes died, at age sixty-one, on November 30, 1878; he had been her partner and champion for nearly twenty-five years and, to some degree, her creator. “Without George Henry Lewes,” Kathryn Hughes wrote, in her excellent biography of Eliot, “there could have been no George Eliot” (_George Eliot: The Last Victorian_, p. 327). Daniel Deronda thus stands as the culmination of a series of novels that began twenty years earlier with