Since its publication in 1876, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda has been described as advocating Jewish territorialism over Cosmopolitanism. Some critics deemed the ‘English’ part of the novel as more worthy than the ‘Jewish’ part, yet the work received praise from contemporary Jewish critics. George Eliot wrote of the novel that she ‘meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there’. This talk will consider Daniel Deronda in context with George Eliot’s other novels and her earlier journalism, and in comparison, with representations of Jewish people in histories and novels of the period, and will explore George Eliot’s broader themes of race, inheritance, nationality, duty and vocation.

Antonia Saunders studied for both her BA and MA at The Open University. Her primary interest is in the novel in all its forms with a particular concentration on the nineteenth and early twentieth century. She began her part time PhD at the OU in October 2020. The working title of her thesis is ‘The construction of a Jewish Identity in histories and novels of the nineteenth century’ which considers the literary and historiographical contexts of representations of Jewish people and Jewish Identity.

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