35 h 6 minAudiobook16 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the life you long for becomes a cage, while a stranger’s suffering gives you a purpose?
At a roulette table in Germany, Gwendolen Harleth catches Daniel Deronda’s eye. Clever, proud and used to admiration, she expects life to bend to her wishes. Then her family loses its money. The wealthy Henleigh Grandcourt offers a way out, but his cold desire for obedience threatens the independence she treasures.
Daniel has money, kindness and every advantage, yet no clear purpose. When he rescues Mirah Lapidoth from the Thames, her search for her lost family draws him into Jewish life in London. George Eliot brings their stories alongside Gwendolen’s, asking what sympathy demands when another person’s troubles become impossible to ignore.
What you’ll discover
- Pride under pressure Follow Gwendolen as family need tests her hunger for admiration and independence.
- The cost of comfort Enter a marriage where wealth offers security but leaves little room for freedom.
- A purpose beyond privilege Watch Daniel seek a calling that comfort and an ordinary career cannot supply.
- Lives beyond country houses Meet Mirah, the Cohen family and Mordecai, whose hopes widen Daniel’s view of life.
- A narrator who reflects Move between minds as Eliot pauses to question motives, choices and duties to others.
Who will love it
For readers who love serious novels about conscience, money and marriage, and who enjoy a narrator who thinks aloud. For anyone drawn to questions of identity, faith, sympathy and finding a purpose.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A gambler's glance across the roulette table
- Gwendolen's family falls and her pride is tested
- Grandcourt arrives and a woman's warning goes unheeded
- Daniel searches for a purpose of his own
- A rescue by the river changes everything
- Mordecai, the dreamer in the pawnshop house
- Gwendolen's marriage becomes a cage
- What the novel says about sympathy and vocation
- How the story is told and how it has been read
Who’s who
- Gwendolen HarlethA beautiful, clever and spoiled young woman who wants admiration and independence, and who must choose between pride and the needs of her family.
- Daniel DerondaA kind, educated young man raised as Sir Hugo's ward, who feels deeply for others and longs for a purpose that is truly his own.
- Henleigh GrandcourtA wealthy, cold and controlling heir who expects obedience, and who sets his sights on Gwendolen as a prize.
- Mirah LapidothA young Jewish singer, gentle and proud, who flees her selfish father and searches London for her lost mother and brother.
- MordecaiA poor, sick and learned man who dreams of a renewed Jewish national life and waits for someone to carry on his ideas.
- Sir Hugo MallingerA good humoured baronet who has raised Daniel with generosity and wants him to follow an ordinary, comfortable career.
- Herr KlesmerA serious German musician who tells Gwendolen the truth about her talent and stands for real devotion to art.
- Hans MeyrickDaniel's cheerful, gifted painter friend from Cambridge, whose warm family shelters Mirah.
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- Audiobook
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- 15-minute summary
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- Paperback
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
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- Large print hardcover
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Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot · 1876
A game of roulette draws Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda into choices that test pride, sympathy and purpose.
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1 of 9
A gambler's glance across the roulette table
The novel opens in a German spa town called Leubronn. In a crowded gaming room, a young Englishwoman is playing roulette, and a stranger watches her. He is Daniel Deronda, and he cannot decide whether she is beautiful or not. Eliot opens with that very question about her, and it sets the tone. The book is going to ask how we judge people from the outside, and how little the outside tells us.
The young woman is Gwendolen Harleth. She wins at first, and she enjoys the attention. Then her luck turns, and she loses. Daniel feels an odd mix of curiosity and discomfort, as if his looking at her has somehow played a part in her fall. Gwendolen notices him watching and takes it for disapproval. She resents him for it, and yet she cannot stop thinking about him.
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What is Daniel Deronda about?
It follows Gwendolen Harleth, a proud young woman who marries for money and regrets it, and Daniel Deronda, a young man searching for a purpose who becomes drawn into Jewish life in London.
Why is Daniel Deronda so controversial?
Eliot placed Jewish characters and the idea of a national homeland at the centre of an English novel. Readers have long debated whether her portraits are generous or uneven, and whether the two halves of the book fit together.
When was Daniel Deronda written and published?
Eliot published it in eight monthly parts in 1876. It is her last novel and the only one set in her own day, so it is fiction about the England she knew.
The author
George Eliot
1819–1880 · English novelist
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist, essayist, poet and journalist. She was born in Warwickshire in 1819 and later lived in London, where she died in 1880. Her novels include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871–1872).
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