![]() ![]() Eliot had already defied convention in her personal life, by living with George Henry Lewes as wife in all but name. Those highly successful authors show little complexity or empathy in their representations, and little willingness to go imaginatively beyond standard expectations. Fictional representations of Jewishness in Dickens and Trollope revealed a readiness to indulge in stereotypes which must have reflected and played to the prejudice of their readerships. Nineteenth-century society was effortlessly and unthinkingly anti-semitic, for all Disraeli’s success, power and prominence. And she pits a Jewish heroine against an English gentle (and gentile) woman, both seeking Deronda’s love. ![]() She creates a hero who turns out to be not the English gentleman he is presented as, but the child of Jewish parents who then takes up the cause of his newly discovered identity. Eliot/Evans herself must have known that she would be courting controversy in making Jewishness her central fictional subject and exploring the very beginnings of Zionism in a sympathetic way. Writing about Daniel Deronda (1876) in the current hectic political climate invites caution and that is precisely what makes George Eliot’s novel so interesting. In the bicentenary year of George Eliot’s birth, Sally Minogue looks at her final and most controversial novel, Daniel Deronda. ![]()
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