Daniel Deronda »

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story (available as a Modern Library hardcover classic) and The Married Man. He has written a long biography of Jean Genet and a short one of Proust. His most recent book is The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. White teaches writing at Princeton University.

1886. Eliot is the pen name for Mary Ann, later Marian, Evans, English novelist. George Eliot's last and most unconventional novel is considered by many to be her greatest. It is a richly imagined epic with a mysterious hero at its heart. Deronda, a high-minded young man searching for his path in life, finds himself drawn by a series of dramatic encounters into two contrasting worlds: the English country-house life of Gwendolen Harleth, a high-spirited beauty trapped in an oppressive marriage, and the very different lives of a poor Jewish girl, Mirah, and her family. As Deronda uncovers the long-hidden secret of his own parentage, Eliot's moving and suspenseful narrative opens up a world of Jewish experience previously unknown to the Victorian novel. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.