Reading Daniel Deronda...

[Three Sparrows]

I am reading Daniel Deronda right now and I have to say, I am just a bit confused. First of all, the title is Daniel Deronda, but so far there isn't too much about him; it looks like the book is more about Gwendolin Harleth and what a sensitive shrew she is. Gwendolin is really bugging me right now, I mean, I get it that she is amazingly beautiful, has a hard time feeling closeness for anyone except her mother, and is rather frightened of Grandcourt, but what else? It's kind of disappointing after such a strong and beautiful beginning. What does everyone else think? Does Daniel Deronda pick up the pace later, or does it focus on looks, feelings and education of two people for the entire novel?
I have to say this for it though, the novel has an uncanny ability to make one want to keep reading in order to find out what will happen next.
Thoughts?

[Jackson Richardson]

I'm reading it now and finding it slow going, although interesting. I'll come back later.

Unlike her earlier novels it is not set in the past, it has extensive scenes in London, and most of the (English) characters are gentry or nobility. More like the cast of a Trollope novel.

I reminds me more of Henry James than earlier George Eliot, but she is always quoted as an omniscient narrator writer whereas he isn''t.

[kev67]

I read somewhere that George Elliot was trying to do something new with Daniel Deronda. She felt she was in danger of repeating herself.

[kev67]

I am almost half way through. It is like two books stapled together. There is the Gwendolin Harleth strand and the Jewish strand. Daniel Deronda is acquainted with Gwendolin, but his story seems like it is just getting under way now. Middlemarch was two stories woven into one: the Dorothea Brooke story and the Tertius Lydgate story, but those strands linked into each other more. I wonder why GE wrote DD like this. I suppose it does leave you in suspense when she leaves one of the protagonists and goes to the other.