George Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda
Abridged
Emma Laybourn
Copyright 2014 Emma Laybourn
Emma Laybourn’s website is at
www.megamousebooks.com
Note on the Abridgement
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot’s final novel, was published in serial form in 1876 to great acclaim. It achieved higher sales than Eliot’s previous masterpiece, Middlemarch; yet it is nowadays the lesser read of the two works.
This can be partly explained by the fact that Daniel Deronda is a more difficult book than Middlemarch, which itself can hardly be called light reading. Many critics have expressed reservations about its binary nature, with the parallel storylines of Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda. The eminent critic F R Leavis considered Deronda’s storyline to be so unsatisfactory that he attempted an abridgement based solely on Gwendolen’s half of the book. However, this was never published.
This new abridgement keeps all elements of the plot, but reduces the book to around sixty per cent of the length of the original. Whilst it remains a sizeable work, I hope that it will prove more accessible to the general reader than the full version.
What has been cut? Some sentences and phrases almost cut themselves. The reader does not need to know where, on all occasions, Gwendolen laid her hat, or what exactly Grandcourt did with his gloves; and scene-setting and small talk are easily condensed. Many learned quotations (including the chapter epigraphs) have been removed, especially where they are likely to be obscure to the modern reader; as have some philosophical asides.
Beyond this, it becomes harder. George Eliot is inclined to employ great travelling-trunks of paragraphs, into which she carefully packs layers of nuanced and exactly detailed meaning. I have attempted to unpack such sections and repack them in shoulder-bag form, containing the essentials only. But what exactly comprises “the essentials” is, of course, open to question. In a book where so much depends on the characters’ thoughts, intentions and motives, I have tried to ensure that these at least make sense.
However, this edition is obviously not suitable for use by those making an academic study of Daniel Deronda. The full text can be downloaded as a free ebook (though with some scanning errors) from Project Gutenberg, whose version provided the basis for this abridgement; and numerous other editions are available elsewhere.
Emma Laybourn
MA University of Sheffield
PGCE City of Manchester CHE.
The cover illustration shows Blackfriars Bridge in the early 19th century.
Regarding the List of Contents:
George Eliot divided Daniel Deronda into 8 books: hyperlinks are attached to each of these. Within these 8 books, hyperlinks are also provided for groups of chapters, rather than for each of the 70 chapters individually, in an attempt to keep the list of contents to a manageable length. While the titles of the 8 books are George Eliot’s, the headings for each group of chapters are my own.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
BOOK I. THE SPOILED CHILD
Chapters 1 to 2: Leubronn
Chapters 3 to 5: Offendene
Chapters 6 to 8: Rex
Chapters 9 to 10: Archery
BOOK II. MEETING STREAMS
Chapters 11 to 14: Grandcourt
Chapters 15 to 16: Deronda
Chapters 17 to 18: Mirah
BOOK III. MAIDENS CHOOSING
Chapter 19 to 20: Mirah’s story
Chapter 21 to 24: Poverty and Klesmer
Chapter 25 to 27: Proposal
BOOK IV. GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE
Chapter 28 to 30: Betrothal
Chapter 30 to 31: Gadsmere
Chapter 32 to 34: The Cohens
BOOK V. MORDECAI
Chapters 35 to 36: Mrs. Grandcourt
Chapters 37 to 40: Mirah and Mordecai
BOOK VI. REVELATIONS
Chapters 44 to 45: Gwendolen in London
Chapters 48 to 49: Deronda departs
BOOK VII. THE MOTHER AND THE SON
Chapters 50 to 51: A mother’s story
Chapters 54 to 55: Yachting
Chapters 56 to 57: The aftermath
BOOK VIII. FRUIT AND SEED
Chapters 58 to 60: Genoa and Mainz
Chapters 61 to 63: A father’s arrival
Chapters 64 to 65: Gwendolen and Deronda
Chapters 66 to 68: A father’s departure
Chapters 69 to 70: Ending
BOOK I: THE SPOILED CHILD