George Eliot's Debt to Richard Wagner: Daniel Deronda and The Flying Dutchman

Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), has often been seen as problematic, and for one major reason: the so-called Jewish storyline. The common sentiment that the novel was one of two distinct halves, one vastly superior to the other, was expressed most famously by F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948), where he refers to the Jewish plot as the ‘bad half’ of the novel (80), and proceeds to rename the ‘good half’, ‘Gwendolen Harleth’ (85). Daniel Deronda, however, is a brilliantly constructed narrative, in which both of the two interweaving storylines play an integral role. By conside... Mehr ...