Daniel Deronda

This is George Eliot's most radical novel, published in 1876 as her final and most controversial work. Two narratives diverge and eventually converge: Gwendolen Harleth, a dazzling young woman trapped by her own vanity and the constraints of Victorian society, begins the novel as a selfish beauty but gradually awakens to moral seriousness after a disastrous marriage. Meanwhile, Daniel Deronda, raised by an aristocratic Englishman but never quite belonging, discovers a Jewish identity and heritage through his friendship with the dying philosopher Mordecai and his devoted sister Mirah. What makes this novel endure is its fearless exploration of identity as something both inherited and chosen, and its insistence that moral transformation remains possible even for the most self-deluded characters. The final scenes, in which Daniel departs for Palestine while Gwendolen faces her own reckoning, still provokes debate over what Eliot intended. This is Victorian fiction at its most intellectually ambitious and emotionally complex.