Daniel Deronda

The novel opens in a German casino, where the beautiful, proud Gwendolen Harleth is gambling and feels herself watched by a young Englishman, Daniel Deronda. Soon after, her family loses its money, and Gwendolen marries the rich, cold Henleigh Grandcourt to save them, breaking a promise she made to another woman. Daniel, raised as the ward of an English baronet without knowing who his parents were, saves a young singer, Mirah, from drowning herself, and through her and her visionary brother Mordecai he begins to discover his own origins.

Published in 1876, George Eliot's last novel was unusual in its time for its sympathetic picture of Jewish life and culture in Victorian England. Its portrait of Gwendolen's guilt and suffering inside a cruel marriage is one of the finest psychological studies in Victorian fiction. Read first Middlemarch.