You have to commit to the prospect of reading a novel by nineteenth-century British author George Eliot. Her books are very long. You have to be willing to put in some time to hang out with her intricate descriptions and scene setting. If you can give her 200 pages before you give up, you will find her books very worthwhile. In part,  because of her long-windedness and detailed scene setting, the reader is rewarded with a rich collection of interwoven stories with fascinating characters and compelling plot lines.

When I decided to finally read George Eliot this year, my 62nd on this planet, I thought that I was late on arrival. Yet, while immersed in the third novel I chose to read of hers, Daniel Deronda, I decided I was reading them at the perfect age. The wisdom in her novels’ portrayal and discussion of humans and their lived lives inspired me to reflect on my own life in a way other books have not. Her brutal honesty encouraged me to look with brutal honesty at my biography as I had not dared before. This offered me permission to use an alternative lens to view myself and others in my life, one with more clarity and compassion. I may have missed this experience if I read the novels at a younger age. I may not have been able to meet them fully in my humanity.

Overall, Eliot’s books make one think: about choices we make, choices we think we have, and our true motives. In a patriarchal society, especially in Victorian England, and Renaissance Italy (the setting of Romola), women of any class had very little actual choice. At the surface level of the plot lines in her novels, the choices they have are: who will I marry ( if there is more than one option), and what to do if I cannot or do not.

However, Eliot exposes other choices within the narrow band of these surface choices. Within those choices are others: What kind of a person will I be? What do I allow to motivate me? Will I be kind? Do I have faith? Do I love animals? Am I a racist? Am I prejudiced? Is my heart open? What is my ambition?

If I am a man, what will be my occupation? Will I have to reject one that is assumed for me? Will I take one out of laziness? Am I to strive to help others? Do I love? Am I to subject women to domination? When faced with an ethical dilemma, how will I fare? Will I have privilege enough to not sell out?

A Philosophical Woman

George Eliot’s novels are deep philosophical studies of humans, human behavior and relationships. They are novels that explore human motivations and ideals—political, social and spiritual— and what happens to those motivations and ideals when they meet culture and circumstance.

Eliot definitely seemed to have her own moral code: try to do good in the world, to be of service. From reading her books, that seems to me to be the highest objective. For her characters anyway. The ones that we truly perceive of as “good” and worthy in her books are the ones, all genders included, who choose to do good, to help others, to strive after a noble cause, to serve.

“Look on other lives besides your own,” Daniel Deronda, the main character of the book of the same title, says to Gwendolen when she asks him what to do about the circumstances of her life, of which she has created a catastrophe. “See what their troubles are and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action—something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot”(446).

Gwendolen is inordinately beautiful. Her family has lost all their money at the opening of the book. She has two different fathers who have both died. She lives with her mother and her sisters. Being the eldest and the most beautiful, her prospects are better than her sisters’. She flaunts her beauty and believes it gives her power. Power over men. But this is not a truth and we can all see that. Hers is a fleeting privilege which will soon end.

Eliot is veracious in her summation of Gwendolen’s lot. At an archery competition at the local country club Gwendolen, new to the community, stuns the crowd with her beauty, agility and charm. Sensing this, Gwendolen, in her glory, peacocks even more.

“Probably the form these rural souls would most have striven for as a tabernacle was some other than Gwendolen’s—one with more pink in her cheeks and hair of the most fashionable yellow; but among the male judges in the ranks immediately surrounding her there was unusual unanimity in pronouncing her the finest girl present.

No wonder she enjoyed her existence on that July day. Preeminence is sweet to those who love it, even under mediocre circumstances: perhaps it is not quite mythical that a slave has been proud to be bought first; and probably a barn-door fowl on sale, though he may not have understood himself to be called the best of a bad lot, may have self-informed consciousness of his relative importance, and strut consoled”(100).

Gwendolen is under the illusion that she possesses a grand power of influence and that, once married, she will force her husband to her will. It is painful to read what becomes of her in her ill-chosen marriage to a debased, abusive, wealthy man at least ten years her senior, Mr Grandcourt, the cousin of Daniel Deronda.

Gwendolen lives in fear that her husband will murder her. “That white hand of his which was touching his whisker was capable, she fancied, of clinging round her neck and threatening to throttle her”(427) .

Gwendolen tells no one. She has no friends. She also wants to keep up this exterior illusion about the power she projects. Her only perceived friend is Deronda who is a false friend. He acquiesces to her requests that he visit her out of a feeling of duty and pity. She has projected goodness onto him because he is an outsider. And he is dark skinned, possessing an olive complexion and dark curly hair.

Daniel Deronda does not know who his parents are. Everyone, including Deronda believe his adoptive father or legal guardian, the man who raised him, Sir Hugo Mallinger, is his birth dad. They gossip that Deronda is a child from another woman and another relationship outside his marriage. Gwendolen has heard these rumors and it makes her feel connected to him. His lack of birth status, makes him “less of a man” in her eyes. It puts him on her level: a woman with no status outside her marriage. He discovers over the course of the novel that he is a Jew, so her suspicion is correct in two ways. His religion or race makes him “less of a man” in this culture. They are both marginalized, her as a woman and he as a Jew.

Gwendolen has very good intuitions but she does not listen to them. She knows she should not marry Grandcourt but she does anyway to save herself from being a governess and therefore not being able to “do as she pleases.” But her marriage puts her in a situation far worse than a governess. She is a sex slave.

Though Eliot does not write about sex explicitly, it is implied in many of the scenes between Gwendolen and Mr Grandcourt, along with violence and subjugation. Her absolute terror of him is palpable.

Eliot often said, if you want to know who I am and what I believe, read my books. The moral code I spoke of earlier is what I take this to mean. Be kind. Be forgiving. Be helpful. Reach out a hand. Find a way to help. Find a way to contribute. Eliot had become an atheist in her maturity. And though we may believe that the moral code I speak of springs from Christian tenets, they are, in fact, Jewish. Tikun Olam, “heal the world,” as it is known in modern times, could be said to be Eliot’s primary philosophical belief.

A Scholarly Woman

George Eliot’s belief system emerged from wisdom traditions she consumed in great quantities. Her knowledge of multiple languages, including German, Greek and Hebrew allowed her to translate many from their original texts, Judaism being one of them.

Homer, Pindar, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Xenophon, James Clerk Maxwell, John Tyndall, Judaica, Mishnah, Talmud. This is a small part of what biographer Gertrude Himmelfarb records (71) from  a reading list Eliot  occupied herself with while preparing to write Daniel Deronda.

“She read the Jewish sources, ancient and modern, in the same appreciative spirit that she read the classics and literature of her own culture. And she placed them both in the same cultural continuum”(Himmelfarb 73).

In a letter she wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe after Stowe’s response to Daniel Deronda in which Stowe informed Eliot that she “preferred the English half to the Jewish half” (Himmelfarb 122), Eliot writes:

“Towards the Hebrews we western people, who have been reared in Christianity, have a particular debt, and whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religion 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 relations of their own social or religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew. . . The best that can be said of it is that it is a sign of  intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity—which is still the average mark of our culture” (qt’d in Himmelfarb 122-123).

George Eliot was clear that what she considered a core belief of importance, love thy neighbor as thyself, came from Judaism.

Daniel Deronda, her final novel is viewed as one of the first thoughtful portrayals of Jewish life in Europe as well as the first fully fleshed out Jewish characters in the history of English Literature.

It wasn’t an accident. She wanted to do it. She wanted to address this issue in her culture, what was then called “the Jewish question.” Eliot knew what she was doing and she stood behind it when scorned. This needs looking at, she said, standing firm in her conviction.

I write this to erase any illusions of passivity one may hold about George Eliot. She was a force. Too often when women accomplish as much as she accomplished it is treated as a happy accident. No. George Eliot worked hard with intention and commitment, and she achieved much.

Stay tuned for, George Eliot (1819-1880), Part 2: The “Slavery of Being a Girl.”

George Eliot is a Nasty Women Writer.

©Theresa C. Dintino 2025

Works Cited

Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Penguin Books, 1995. First published in 1876.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot. Encounter Books, 2009, 2012.