George Eliot and the Sequel Question

While from its first appearance in 1876, many Jewish and Christian readers alike have endorsed performing some kind of reductive surgery on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (most famously, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition, who advocated excising the "Jewish part" and renaming the remainder Gwendolen Harleth), there is another related but largely forgotten line of response to the novel that cuts in somewhat different ways: the arrival, in the immediate wake of the publication of Deronda, of two sequels by other hands, a shorter English satire and a full-blown American novel. Gillian Beer has argued that Deronda is a novel "haunted by the future," one (or more than one) ultimately and deliberately left unwritten by Eliot. But the sequels manifest that future: more precisely, they attempt to impose closure on a novel that notoriously resists it. The ethos of the sequel as a genre typically is one of cooperation and integration with the earlier work. The sequel usually represents a means to honor the power of the original, and an attempt to recapture and further extend that power. But for Eliot, and especially for Deronda, the sequel is a reproach. In aesthetic and ideological ways the sequels and related "variations" on Deronda offer critical attacks on Eliot's plot, structure, and characters, but particularly her treatment of the Jewish Question. I suggest that these continuations are significant not only for their content, offering as they do reactionary responses to Eliot's controversial book, but also for their printed forms. Emerging alongside an analytical tradition of desires for "simple surgery" upon the object of scrutiny, these texts cut their literary forebear a glance that mocks Eliot's tolerance even as they underscore the status and identity of her novel and corpus as material objects. The sequels in turn provide a new opportunity to understand the unique position and implicit legacy of Deronda within modernity.