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This paper examines the tension between ambition and failure in the trajectories of the female protagonists in three George Eliot novels—Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede (1859), Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871-72), and Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda (1876). Building on Franco Moretti’s notion of a ‘distinct female Bildungsroman’, I argue that these characters’ development follows a similar three-step structure as they navigate the constraints of gender, class, and socioeconomic status. The dialectical interplay between ambition and coercion sustains the narratives on the brink of possibility and impossibility, while Eliot’s narrative choices challenge traditional forms of the Bildungsroman, offering a critique of the genre as it applies to women.

In a probing analysis that has broad implications for theories of reading, Bernard J. Paris explores how personal needs and changes in his own psychology have affected his responses to George Eliot over the years. Having lost his earlier enthusiasm for her “Religion of Humanity,” he now appreciates the psychological intuitions that are embodied in her brilliant portraits of characters and relationships. Concentrating on Eliot’s most impressive psychological novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Paris focuses on her detailed portrayals of major characters in an effort to recover her intuitions and appreciate her mimetic achievement. He argues that although she intended for her characters to provide confirmation of her views, she was instead led to deeper, more enduring truths, although she did not consciously comprehend the discoveries she had made. Like her characters, Paris argues, these truths must be disengaged from her rhetoric in order to be perceived.

While leading the just and good life in the Western tradition has long been premised on an aversion to chance, much of the fiction of the nineteenth century suggests that setting up an antagonistic relationship between risk and morality doesn’t simply deny contingency, it also stunts the eventuality of personal/moral growth deriving from both failed and successful risk-taking and denies as well the possible harm caused by conformity and inaction. George Eliot demonstrates throughout Daniel Deronda that the real dangers for Gwendolen Harleth reside with “the risks that lie within,” the ease of acquiescing to moral complacency and self-limiting models of aesthetic experience. She implies that the potential for harm is far greater when her protagonist relies on beauty as a safe bet for achieving her aims and to this end utilizes experiences of the sublime throughout the novel to act as a vital counterforce to the complacency and stagnation that threaten to dominate Gwendolen’s future.

Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the \"Jewish question\" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India. Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls \"the exemplary crisis of minority\"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the \"Jewish question\" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance.

It is one of the curiosities of history that the most remarkable novel about Jews and Judaism, predicting the establishment of the Jewish state, should have been written in 1876 by a non-Jew - a Victorian woman and a formidable intellectual, who is generally regarded as one of the greatest of English novelists. And it is still more curious that Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's last novel, should have been dismissed, by many of her admirers at the time and by some critics since, as something of an anomaly, an inexplicable and unfortunate turn in her life and work. Yet Eliot herself was passionately committed to that novel, having prepared herself for it by an extraordinary feat of scholarly research in five languages (including Hebrew), exploring the ancient, medieval, and modern sources of Jewish history. Three years later, to reenforce that commitment, she wrote an essay, the very last of her writing, reaffirming the heritage of the Jewish \"nation\" and the desirability of a Jewish state - this well before the founders of Zionism had conceived of that mission. Why did this Victorian novelist, born a Christian and an early convert to agnosticism, write a book so respectful of Judaism and so prescient about Zionism? And why at a time when there were no pogroms or persecutions to provoke her? What was the general conception of the \"Jewish question,\" and how did Eliot reinterpret that \"question,\" for her time as well as ours? Gertrude Himmelfarb, a leading Victorian scholar, has undertaken to unravel the mysteries of Daniel Deronda. And the mysteries of Eliot herself: a novelist who deliberately wrote a book she knew would bewilder many of her readers, a distinguished woman who opposed the enfranchisement of women, a moralist who flouted the most venerable of marital conventions - above all, the author of a novel that is still an inspiration or provocation to readers and critics alike.

This is the second part of a tribute to the pioneering George Eliot scholar, Alfred Abraham Möller. In this part, Erika Hirsch, assisted by Markus Neacey, provides biographical details and the immediate historical, social, and political background from which Möller's work emerged.

Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s linking of the ideas of the foreigner with women and the state of marriage in Strangers to Ourselves, and Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec’s thesis in “Of Other Spaces” that apparently quite ordinary sites can contest the ideologically normative, this article looks at patterns of alienation and domestication that shape the novel. For Kristeva, the foreigner is not confined to those deemed to be the enemy or an outsider but is produced in relation to crises that threaten the autonomy of the self through social mechanisms that are known, rather than alien. Similarly, Foucault examines the “lands of exile,” of crisis and deviation, which can develop within domestic social formations. These theoretical perspectives are used to analyze the fundamental differences in the structure and outcomes of the two narrative “streams,” as George Eliot called them, of Daniel Deronda: that of Daniel himself and, the main focus of the analysis, of Gwendolen.

This article traces the place of the Book of Esther in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and argues that the biblical work can be seen as Eliot's primary \"map\" in her own project of literal and metaphorical remapping. Historical and cultural contexts, as well as close readings of the texts, suggest that the Book of Esther is especially relevant because it engages with the \"Jewish Question\" and the \"Woman Question\" in tandem; it offers a terrain for the novel's ideas on both issues, while precipitating a revised hermeneutic of the biblical text. Remapping the Book of Esther serves Eliot in advocating for a Jewish return and to the Land of Israel and in spurring discourse towards the depolarization of gendered traits, roles, and relations. However, while Eliot answers the Jewish Question with proto-Zionism, she leaves the Woman Question chillingly unanswered—as does the Book of Esther itself.

This essay argues that the ekphrastic images in Daniel Deronda (1876) mark a shift in George Eliot’s thought away from a historical to a prophetic national mode. Taking as a point of departure the critical commonplace that Eliot’s novel has two largely separate spheres, a degenerate English world and a visionary Jewish realm, I show that each has a painterly model. The grounds of stately English homes represent a false Arcadia in passages that allude to the genre of landscape known as ‘‘ideal.’’ While the glowing river landscapes that frame Jewish characters conjure the extrasensory, they have a material correlative in the paintings of J.M.W. Turner. In my reading, these vivid scenes comprise a response to the vexed status of the nation that issues from philosophical empiricism. The nation is too large a body to be perceived directly or depicted fully in fiction. Eliot’s sunset landscapes form a locus for propositions about how the mind may reach beyond experience. With images of arched bridges, she transmutes an empiricist metaphor for the mental process of prediction through inference into a symbol for prophecy. The gold skies light up the distance, directing the reader to conceive a national ideal Eliot cannot locate or provide: ultimately, both empiricism and idealism prove insufficient to her fictional project, nonetheless brilliant, of national reanimation.

I expand scholarship by Lawson and Shakinovsky, Rintoul, Surridge, and Tromp on marital abuse in nineteenth-century British fiction. Due to Blackstone's theory of coverture, wives allegedly consented on their wedding days to future abuse. Further, Bacon legalized physical and emotional marital abuse, and Hale established the marital rape exemption. The public, including nonfiction writers, erroneously asserted that marital abuse existed almost entirely in the lower classes, but fiction writers countered that myth by showing “consensual” abuse in middle- and upper-class marriages. With middle-class physical and emotional marital abuse in “Janet's Repentance” and upper-class sexual marital abuse in Daniel Deronda, Eliot shows all marital abuse as nonconsensual and enabled more overt condemnations of upper-class sexual marital abuse from Egerton's “Virgin Soil” and Galsworthy's The Man of Property and In Chancery.