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Subverting (Great) Expectations
Sep. 13th, 2004 09:06 pm27 Jun 2004
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot - Wordsworth Classics 1996
* * * * *
It starts with the great cliche of romances - a handsome young man and a beautiful young woman catch sight of each other across a crowded room. But George Eliot had done romance in her earlier novels and the relationship that develops between them is very different from the one that you expect.
For a start, they don't like each other much. The room in which they meet is a casino. Gwendolen is gambling and gets put off by Deronda looking at and, she (rightly) thinks, judging her, which establishes with wonderful economy that she is a) a risk-taker and b) overly sensitive to what other people think. When she pawns her necklace to cover her losses, he buys it back and returns it to her with a superciliously worded note. Unsurprisingly, they don't see each other again until almost half way through the book.
( Read More )
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot - Wordsworth Classics 1996
* * * * *
It starts with the great cliche of romances - a handsome young man and a beautiful young woman catch sight of each other across a crowded room. But George Eliot had done romance in her earlier novels and the relationship that develops between them is very different from the one that you expect.
For a start, they don't like each other much. The room in which they meet is a casino. Gwendolen is gambling and gets put off by Deronda looking at and, she (rightly) thinks, judging her, which establishes with wonderful economy that she is a) a risk-taker and b) overly sensitive to what other people think. When she pawns her necklace to cover her losses, he buys it back and returns it to her with a superciliously worded note. Unsurprisingly, they don't see each other again until almost half way through the book.
( Read More )