As Daniel Deronda" opens Gwendolen Harleth is poised at the roulette-table prepared to throw away her family fortune. She is observed by Daniel Deronda a young man groomed in the finest tradition of the English upper-classes. & while Gwendolen loses everything & becomes trapped in an oppressive marriage Derondas fortunes take a different turn. After a dramatic encounter with the young Jewish woman Mirah he becomes involved in a search for her lost family & finds himself drawn into ever-deeper sympathies with Jewish aspirations & identity. I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else wrote George Eliot of her last & most ambitious novel & in weaving her plot strands together she created a bold & richly textured picture of British society & the Jewish experience within it."