The literary critic FR Leavis was so impressed by the character of Gwendolen Harleth in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda that he believed the book should have been named after her. Eliot's final novel tells the interlinked stories of Gwendolen and Deronda, both of whom earn new identities after brutal journeys of self-discovery.
Deronda’s transformation is set against a historical backdrop, with Eliot exploring the rise of proto-Zionism across Europe in the latter half of the 19th century. Gwendolen’s change takes place within the domestic sphere. The suffering she endures through marriage and family misfortune leads to painful self-awareness. Leavis considered Gwendolen’s profound psychological development the core of the novel, surmising that it would have been a better book without the subplots involving Deronda.
Diana Souhami is likewise enthralled with Eliot's heroine, the inspiration for her debut novel. The English author is best known for her acclaimed biographies, which include Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, Edith Cavell and the Whitbread-winning Selkirk's Island.
Good biography lets the voice of its subject emerge through the writing. Souhami takes her skills in this area and applies them admirably to her fictional protagonist. Thirty years on, a wiser Gwendolen reflects on the mistakes of her youth and her enduring love for Deronda. Souhami’s elegant writing provides a captivating voice from the beginning: “I was winning when I met your gaze. Its persistence made me raise my head then doubt myself. It broke my luck.”
Feminist undertones
At the Kursaal in Homburg, Gwendolen delights in playing roulette, aware of her many admirers: “I heard Vandernoodt say a man might risk hanging for Gwendolen Harleth.” Deronda is the handsome stranger who breaks her streak, drawn to the beautiful young woman but unimpressed by her behaviour.
Haughty and spoilt, Gwendolen’s world implodes when her family’s fortune is lost. She pawns a necklace to travel home to her widowed mother. Deronda returns it to her, sparking an attachment that grows, for Gwendolen at least, in intensity and idealism as her life takes a series of tragic turns.
The worst of these is a hasty marriage to the sadistic Grandcourt. Gwendolen agrees to it in order to save her mother and sisters from ruin, but knowing what she does of him, her decision is naïve and proves disastrous. Living in darkness with Grandcourt, she idolises Deronda. Immersed in her own misery, Gwendolen is unable to grasp the wider world that pulls her hero away.
With strong feminist undertones, Souhami vividly depicts the dangers of an insular mind and how trapped women of that era really were. Gwendolen hopes to be a singer to escape these confines. Her hopes are publicly dashed by Herr Klesmer and his piercing assessment of her voice: “It makes men small as they listen to it.”
With few options available, Gwendolen accepts Grandcourt’s proposal. “Marriage is the only true and satisfactory sphere of a woman.” This line from Eliot’s novel takes on new meaning in Souhami’s retelling.
Souhami gives the reader a future Gwendolen, free from the constraints of family and marriage, trying to find herself and fit in among London’s literary elite.
The metanarrative in this latter section moves from the fictional to the real world, with Gwendolen encountering, among others, the feminist campaigner Barbara Bodichon, Eliot’s partner George Lewes and, of course, the novelist herself, amusingly described by her own creation: “They were authors – both very ugly, he vivacious, she intense, her voice low, her eyes observant.”
With the Deronda and Grandcourt storylines wrapped up, the plot falls away. Passages feel repetitive as Gwendolen relates her past to her new friends. The lives of minor characters are related in a biographical style.
While this provides plenty of in jokes, as when Gwendolen accuses Mrs Lewes of “contriving a version of me then condemning her own creation”, the real story belongs to Gwendolen and her enchanting voice. Her hard-earned insights are what we remember: “I feared being no more than the reflected image of desire in an admirer’s eyes, or a puppet in the hand of a stranger.”
Older Gwendolen is a convincing narrator, self-aware and reflective. There is the sense that she has suffered enough, that her conscience, if not completely clear, has been soothed. The narcissistic fantasies of youth are gone, replaced by a cautionary tale of reality: “Circumstance, sudden impulse, misguided optimism, and fear of loneliness and penury shape our decision-making and our lives and, when we are unlucky, herald our despair.”
