Daniel Deronda - George Eliot (best romance books of all time txt) 📗

Daniel Deronda

By George Eliot.

Table of Contents Titlepage Imprint Dedication Foreword Epigraph Daniel Deronda Book I: The Spoiled Child I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X Book II: Meeting Streams XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII Book III: Maidens Choosing XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII Book IV: Gwendolen Gets Her Choice XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV Book V: Mordecai XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX XL Book VI: Revelations XLI XLII XLIII XLIV XLV XLVI XLVII XLVIII XLIX Book VII: The Mother and the Son L LI LII LIII LIV LV LVI LVII Book VIII: Fruit and Seed LVIII LIX LX LXI LXII LXIII LXIV LXV LXVI LXVII LXVIII LXIX LXX Endnotes Colophon Uncopyright Imprint

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To my dear husband
George Henry Lewes

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
⋮
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee⁠—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Foreword Extracts from a Letter Written Oct. 29, 1876, to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe

“As to the Jewish element in Deronda, I expected from first to last, in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance and even repulsion than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is⁠—I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid when viewed in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all Oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us. There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellowmen who most differ from them in customs and beliefs. But towards the Hebrews we Western people who have been reared in Christianity have a peculiar debt, and whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called ‘educated’ making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coattails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness⁠—in plain English, the stupidity⁠—which is still the average mark of our culture. Yes, I expected more aversion than I have found. But I was happily independent in material things, and felt no temptation to accommodate my writing to any standard except that of trying to do my best in what seemed to me most needful to be done; and I sum up with the writer of the Book of Maccabees: ‘If I have done well and as befits the subject, it is what I desired; and if I have done ill, it is what I could attain unto.’ ”

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, ’mid the throng of hurrying desires
That trample on the dead to seize their spoil,
Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
As exhalations laden with slow death,
And o’er the fairest troop of captured joys
Breathes pallid pestilence.

Daniel Deronda Book I The Spoiled Child I

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has