Europe and Beyond: Romola, Daniel Deronda

Abstract

George Eliot’s international outlook soon strikes the reader. She can take a world-look while dwelling on very provincial matters. Though she never travelled outside Europe, her narrator’s allusions in the novels often roam through Europe and other areas, especially the Middle East. After her first trip abroad in 1849, she revisited the Continent as many as sixteen times in a quarter of a century, sometimes for several months at a time. Her total time spent in Germany and Austria was two years.¹ These journeys were part of her study of English culture in its wider context. Her reading in the classics, in Jewish and Christian writings, in post-Renaissance literature and philosophy in the principal modern European languages, gave her a deep insight into both geography and history. She was, of course, particularly concerned about the progress of democratic and nationalist politics in nineteenth-century Europe. Without quite foreseeing the disastrous turns these movements would take in the next century, George Eliot treated them soberly. She devoted two novels to such problems, one set in Renaissance Italy, the other in the mid-Victorian present with the future of Europe’s Jews as a major concern.