Daniel Deronda

It opens at a roulette table in a foreign spa, with a watching stranger's question — “Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” The gambler is Gwendolen Harleth: beautiful, clever, spoiled, and, when her family's fortune collapses, willing to marry the cold and cruel Henleigh Grandcourt for the safety he offers. Her marriage becomes the slow, harrowing education of a young woman who has never before had to reckon with anyone's reality but her own.

The stranger is Daniel Deronda, and his story runs the opposite way. Raised as the ward of an English baronet and uncertain of his birth, he is drawn — through his rescue of the Jewish singer Mirah and his friendship with her visionary brother Mordecai — into a world he never knew was his own. The discovery of his Jewish heritage turns sympathy into identity, and gives him a purpose far larger than himself.

Eliot braids the two lives together with all the moral psychology that made her the supreme novelist of the Victorian age. Notable as the first English novel to portray Judaism and the dream of a Jewish homeland with full seriousness and sympathy, Daniel Deronda has been argued over ever since — most famously by the critic F. R. Leavis, who wished to keep the Gwendolen story and cut the rest. This edition lets readers judge the whole for themselves.

A study of marriage, money, and moral growth, and of how a self enlarges or shrinks according to whether it can imagine a life beyond its own desires, it remains among the most daring and rewarding of the great Victorian novels.