Daniel Deronda is a novel by English author George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans, first published in eight parts (books) February to September 1876.

The work's mixture of social satire and moral searching, along with its sympathetic rendering of Jewish proto-Zionist ideas, has made it the controversial final statement of one of the most renowned Victorian novelists.

The novel has two main strands of plot, and while the "story of Gwendolen" has been described as "one of the masterpieces of English fiction", that part concerned with Daniel Deronda has been described as "flat and unconvincing".

Daniel finds himself attracted to, but wary of, the beautiful, stubborn, and selfish Gwendolen, whom he sees losing all her winnings in a game of roulette.

At first she is open to his advances, but upon discovering that Grandcourt has several children with his mistress, Lydia Glasher, she eventually flees to the German town where she meets Daniel.

This portion of the novel sets Gwendolen up as a haughty and selfish, yet affectionate, daughter admired for her beauty but suspected by many in society because of her satirical observations and somewhat manipulative behaviour.

One day in late July 1865,[3] as he is boating on the Thames, Daniel rescues a young Jewish woman, Mirah Lapidoth, from attempting to drown herself.

Moved by her tale, Daniel undertakes to help her look for her mother (who turns out to have died years earlier) and brother; through this, he is introduced to London's Jewish community.

She is unwilling to marry (the only respectable way in which a woman could achieve real financial security); and she is also reluctant to become a governess, because it would drastically lower her social status from being a member of the wealthy landed gentry to being almost a servant.

During a trip to Italy, Grandcourt is knocked from his boat into the water, and after some hesitation, Gwendolen jumps into the Mediterranean in a futile attempt to save him.

Daniel was the only child of that union, and on her husband's death, she asked Sir Hugo to raise her son as an English gentleman, never to know that he was Jewish.

Despite there being a Jewish-born Prime Minister (Benjamin Disraeli was baptised as a boy into the Church of England following his father's renunciation of Judaism), the view of Jews among non-Jewish Britons at the time was often prejudiced, sometimes to the point of derision or revulsion.

[11][12] On its publication, Daniel Deronda was immediately translated into German and Dutch and was given an enthusiastic extended review by the Austrian Zionist rabbi and scholar David Kaufmann.

[15] In 1948, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition gave the opinion that the Jewish sections of the book were its weakest, and that a truncated version called Gwendolen Harleth should be printed on its own.