[fantasyfan]

This is a case where I go along with F.R. Leavis. The Deronda section didn't work at all for me. I would agree with Bookpossum that Daniel is too good to be true and I personally find him too saintly to be likeable. Gwendolen is much more believable and I can honestly feel a compassion for her suffering at the end even as she accepts that her life must go on even if it is to be a lonely journey.

“You have been very good to me. I have deserved nothing. I will try—try to live. I shall think of you. What good have I been? Only harm. Don’t let me be harm to you. It shall be the better for me—”

She could not finish. It was not that she was sobbing, but that the intense effort with which she spoke made her too tremulous. The burden of that difficult rectitude toward him was a weight her frame tottered under.

She bent forward to kiss his cheek, and he kissed hers. Then they looked at each other for an instant with clasped hands, and he turned away.

When he was quite gone, her mother came in and found her sitting motionless.

“Gwendolen, dearest, you look very ill,” she said, bending over her and touching her cold hands.

“Yes, mamma. But don’t be afraid. I am going to live,” said Gwendolen, bursting out hysterically.

Her mother persuaded her to go to bed, and watched by her. Through the day and half the night she fell continually into fits of shrieking, but cried in the midst of them to her mother, “Don’t be afraid. I shall live. I mean to live.”

After all, she slept; and when she waked in the morning light, she looked up fixedly at her mother and said tenderly, “Ah, poor mamma! You have been sitting up with me. Don’t be unhappy. I shall live. I shall be better.”


I find that a deeply moving moment . . . . I have no such emotional response to anything in the Deronda part of the novel.


I notice that Diana Souhami has made an attempt to retell the story of Gwendolen Harleth in her novel Gwendolen: A Novel It is not an abridgement of Eliot, rather ". . . a bravura re-imagining of the life of one of English literature's most multi-faceted and contradictory heroines". (Comment from te Kindle edition}.

Rebecca Mead describes it thus:

In "Gwendolen" Souhami performs a bold feat of imagination: what would happen if George Eliot's final novel were retold from the perspective of its beautiful, complicated, circumscribed heroine? The result is intriguing and moving: a fictional recovery of the woman's interior experience that lies untold behind the man's journey to fulfillment, and a powerful meditation upon the nature of creativity. Both an arresting interpretation of George Eliot's work and a compelling fiction in its own right, "Gwendolen" will be whispering in my ear next time I go back to "Daniel Deronda"

The ebook is quite inexpensive and I intend to give it a try. It does reinforce my feeling that the greatness of the novel lies with Gwendolen Harleth.