Kristen's review
Daniel Deronda (Modern Library Classics) by George Eliot
wow this an amazing bit of writing about the position of oppressed groups in English society in the 1860s, specifically women and Jews. Eliot is brilliant in her portrayal of how people get trapped by circumstances, how they might resist those traps and how and why they might fail. The issues which I always think of as current: identity politics, questions of assimilation, how power relationships function, etc are put into play as the driving force of this very very slow-moving very very long book. It took a lot of setting this book aside to get through to the really interesting action and analysis in the last 200 pages (damn my TV attention span!), but it was worth it. I wish I was still in school so I could re-read the book and write a paper on it.
I think you have to spot George Eliot a couple hundred pages. If you have the patience to do that, it's so worth it! I found that with Middlemarch; the first half was really slow (interesting but slow), but then I could not put it down. I'm glad you liked this book, I also thought it was amazing and so ahead of its time!
