Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), has often been seen as problematic,
and for one major reason: the so-called Jewish storyline. The common sentiment
that the novel was one of two distinct halves, one vastly superior to the other, was
expressed most famously by F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948), where
he refers to the Jewish plot as the ‘bad half’ of the novel (80), and proceeds to
rename the ‘good half’, ‘Gwendolen Harleth’ (85). Daniel Deronda, however,
is a brilliantly constructed narrative, in which both of the two interweaving
storylines play an integral role. By considering this novel alongside the artistic
debt George Eliot owed to the German composer, Richard Wagner, the necessity,
and beauty, of the Jewish storyline is revealed. Moreover, in bringing together
Daniel Deronda, and Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Eliot’s ongoing fascination
with the composer, his works, and his theories of ‘modern music’, can be explored
in all their many contradictions, and the Wagnerian aspects of Eliot’s final novel
can be further uncovered.