What Book to Read?

It’s probably evident only to me that lately I’ve had a bit of an obsession with books about aspects of Spain. Recent posts include Robert Wilson’s crime fiction series set in Spain, with The Hidden Assassins and The Blind Man of Seville; then there was Moorish Spain, an historical account by Richard Fletcher and The Alhambra, by Washington Irving, a nineteenth century mixture of reportage and legend. OK, but what has this got to do with George Eliot? Well, Deronda is a name that would once have been de Ronda; though he doesn’t know it, Daniel’s family were Jews living in the Spanish town of Ronda before being driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. I should in all consistency write a post on Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is set in the Spanish town of Segovia, and recounts events that actually took place in Ronda. But that’s for another day.

Daniel Deronda (1876) was George Eliot’s last novel. For the critic F.R. Leavis, it confirmed her greatness as a novelist. He initially suggested that the two story threads that make it up could best be seen as two separate books, one chronicling the fate of Gwendolen Harleth, the other dealing with Daniel Deronda. But he later concluded that what bound their stories together was more important than the seemingly disparate elements. In this I agree with him.

The book begins with Gwendolen, a spoilt young woman who wants to be independent – but not from any feminist desire for self-improvement or doing good to others: ‘She meant to do what was pleasant to herself in a striking manner; or rather, whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get in that reflected way a more ardent sense of living’. She is a main character, but is she a heroine? Certainly she is no Emma; Austen Jane said that Emma was ‘a heroine whom no one but myself will much like’, yet everyone does so. This is not the case for Gwendolen. Yet the power of Eliot’s writing is to show Gwendolen as selfish and conceited, but at the same time to show that she has other, better feelings. You can’t completely dislike her.

Gwendolen is in the same position as other nineteenth century females in life and literature in that her life chances are drastically limited; there are few roles open beyond wife and mother. Her story in some ways echoes the form of the ‘romance’ of which Jane Austen was such a mistress; a man and a woman find they love each but obstacles arise and they must struggle to overcome them. (There are some interesting comparisons between Austen’s and Eliot’s preoccupations; see for example two quotations: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.’ And ‘Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach.’) But without telling you what actually does happen, I can say that this is not the case here; it is more a story about redemption than successful romance. This is probably one of the reasons a critic like Leavis approves the book; he thought literature should carry moral weight. But how Gwendolen comes to understand herself differently seems to me to show great psychological insight on Eliot’s part, and I certainly didn’t find any sense of there being a moral for morality’s sake.

Deronda is the protégé Sir Hugo Mallinger, a well-to-do English gentleman who has brought him up to be an English gentleman in his turn. Deronda himself, and most other people, think he is Sir Hugo’s unacknowledged illegitimate son. This belief has an unsettling effect on him; what are the implications of it for his place in English society, and as we would say these days, for his sense of identity? It seems at first that Deronda’s story is secondary to that of Gwendolen, and it’s true that Eliot could have written a whole novel about her fate, and Deronda’s part in it. But a kind act on his part leads the narrative into another path altogether where Deronda seeks to find out about his mother. In doing so, he finds he has quite a different heritage from the one he was brought up with. I guess I gave this away be saying that his family name was originally de Ronda, but knowing that (which may in any case have been be self-evident to some) doesn’t spoil the story of what he finds out. Unlike Gwendolen, however, Daniel is rather too much a paragon of virtue. Eliot occasionally gently mocks him, and we see his doubts and fears. But he is unvaryingly generous and thoughtful. In my view, being consistently nice makes him a foil for Gwendolen, rather than deserving the title role; his circumstances change, but he does not develop as she does.

These two stories are linked in many ways into an intricate pattern. Thinking about it in a purely objective way, there are too many coincidences, too many parallels. But reading the book, I really enjoyed these. There is so much insight, so much interest in Eliot’s narrative that somehow the twists of fate seem acceptable in ways they might not in the hands of a lesser writer.

I haven’t left much space to comment on Eliot’s writing. Yes, there were a few times when the long sentences seem over-burdened with qualifying clauses and the nineteenth century prose style makes reading seem like wading through treacle. Eliot writes with the ‘god perspective’ that allows her to know all, and reveal all about her characters, and to moralise, if you like, in ways that are quite unfashionable among modern writers. It took me a little while to get used to it, but Eliot in general writes with such a light ironic touch that reading her quickly becomes a pleasure.  I’ll give just one tiny example: ’Lord Slogan [was] an unexceptionable Irish peer, whose estate wanted nothing but drainage and population.’

The link with Spain turned out to be tenuous – but I’m really glad it prompted me to read the novel. You can find out more about George Eliot here, and about the book here. There’s rather more to it than I’ve indicated in this post. F.R. Leavis wrote the introduction to the edition I read; I found his prose far more opaque than George Eliot’s. A 2002 TV series based on the book sounds interesting.