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Prophecy and Myth in Daniel Deronda
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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Daniel Deronda is the last of George Eliot's novels, and the one that describes her contemporaries. Mary Anne Evans, who became Marian, Polly to her intimates, and concealed her feminine identity under the pseudonym of George Eliot, was a schoolgirl at the time represented in Middlemarch . The religion described in Scenes of Clerical Life and in Adam Bede was in substance hers until 1841. When in 1856 she began to tell tales about it she had already translated The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by D.F. Strauss and The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach. But she could write of ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism’ as one who had experienced it from within when the Evangelical revival stood for serious religion, for the conviction of sin.
In Daniel Deronda ‘hurrying march of crowded Time towards the world-changing battle of Sadowa’ where Prussia defeated Austria in July 1866, dates Daniel's wait in Genoa for his unknown mother, who will tell him that her father and his were both Jews, like Mirah who in the July of the year before stepped into his boat opposite Kew Gardens with the cloak that she had soaked in the river to hasten her drowning. Something has been told beforehand of his background at home with Sir Hugo Mallinger at Topping Abbey, at Eton and at Cambridge and a German university, and of his suspicion of his illegitimacy; but his meetings with Mirah, with her brother Mordccai, and with Gwendolen Harleth, who became the wife and then the widow of Grandcourt, Sir Hugo’s nephew and the heir apparent to his baronetcy, all belong to 1865 and 1866.
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- Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Westminster Review for July 1856, p. 457 in a review of novels.
2 Penguin edition, Harmondsworth 1967, p. 684.
3 Daniel Deronda as 2, p. 875.
4 The Literary Remains of the late Emmanuel Deutsch, with a memoir (by Lady Strangford), London and New York 1874, contains articles on the Talmud and Islam.
5 Rum und Jerusalem. A summary is in Neville Barbour, Nisi Dominus, a survey of the Palestine question, Beirut 1969, pp. 35–8Google Scholar.
6 The Life of Jesus by Strauss, D.F., London 1848Google Scholar. 6th ed. 1913, pp. 73–5.
7 Ibid. p. 85.
8 Cross, J.W., George Eliot's Life as told in her letters and journals 2nd ed. London and Edinburgh 1886, p. 395Google Scholar, G.S. Haight; George Eliot, a biography, Oxford 1968, p. 39.
9 Daniel Deronda, p. 231.
10 Ibid. p. 632.
11 Ibid. pp. 881–2.
12 Ibid. p. 266.
13 R.H. Hutton in The Spectator, 10 June 1876. On 29 July he was more positive.
14 See R.F. Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch, Harmondsworth 1993, p. 226 and ref.
15 G.S. Haight, op. cit., pp. 463–5 and 507.
16 Daniel Deronda, p. 416, remembered on p. 424.
17 The Jewish Chronicle, London, 15 Dec. 1876. See also R. Levitt, George Eliot and the Jewish Connection, Jerusalem 1975 and S. Werses in Daniel Deronda, a centenary symposium, ed. Alice Shalvi, Jerusalem, 1976.
18 Darnel Deronda, p. 881.
19 Ibid. p. 724.
20 Tibawi, A.L., Russian cultural penetration of Syria–Palestine in the nineteenth century, reprinted from The Royal Central Asia Journal 52, 1966, p. 3Google Scholar.
21 Daniel Deronda, p. 5 84.
22 Ibid. p. 413
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