Oddly, Daniel Deronda both constructs its greatness and, at the same time, shows itself grievously flawed through a doubling or setting up of parallel narratives, loosely linked by the title character, which take way too long to barely touch. The critical stance on the flaw is longstanding: Eliot knew very much about the interior of young women's minds and the upper class marriages of her British peers, but, quite obviously, she knew a lot less about Europe's Jewish community and thus the marriage (or not) of these two worlds produces a sort of lopsided novel, full of insight and tragic beauty in the one narrative, and naive pseudo-racism in the other.

While this is quite evidently true, or at least my reading concurred with the critical consensus before I knew of it, the sheer audacity and ultimate beauty of the attempt here to find common ground between late nineteenth century Zionism and the marriage habits of the English Gentry, and the wonderful theme of human, societal, and kinship relationships--what we owe to others and they to us, both our co-nationals, parents, family and even friends--is rather astounding. Thus five stars for the sheer chutzpah to attempt such an ambitious project. It does, in fits and starts, actually work, even as it utterly fails occasionally. Yet its success and failure hinge so closely upon the same thing, the very core of what the narrative seeks to do, that there's no imaging another version or a correction, it just is what it is, a glorious near miss, missing only because it aims so much higher than 99% of the other novels ever written.

Some of the parallels are obvious: the woman who was forced by an evil parent to sing and act when she didn't want to and the woman who had to break the bonds of her evil parent in order to do the singing and acting that she longed to do, but also more subtle as all of the characters represent various types of parents, or friends, or relatives, or spouces. We see those who abandon relationships for personal realization, and those who renounce themselves to serve family or race, as well as the struggle of the major players to do both, perhaps even at the same time. Thus the theme of human responsibility to one another rings true and important in the novel. It's not didactic, but rather presented as a kind of spectrum, inviting us to measure our own engagement with others through the panorama of relationships that it presents. This greatness of this theme, then, makes the flaws of passages, the naiveté of certain portraits and scenes, seem rather unimportant at tale's end--yet they were annoying at times as I read.