George Eliot’s Provincial Novels

The formal innovations in George Eliot’s late work Daniel Deronda transform the style and shape of the provincial novel, the genre she perfected in earlier works. These changes reflect a new way of thinking about mobility and space which derives from the conditions of late nineteenth-century imperialism and the ideology of ‘Greater Britain’. Emigration is central to this. The population of Britons settled in overseas colonies over the century by now constitutes a significant world-wide economic and political force. Concerted political and cultural efforts to consolidate this dispersed group were part of imperialist efforts to exert British domination across the globe. In the novel, white settler emigration is evident in the background, but the spotlight falls instead on Daniel’s Jewish emigration to Palestine. Developing a comparative method borrowed from contemporary historian Henry Maine, Eliot compares different styles of emigration, and in this strikingly anti-semitic work exposes the racism and oppressive power dynamics implicit in white settler ideology. Daniel Deronda’s complex engagement with Jewish theology transforms emigration into a reparative and utopian vision of world renewal. In the novel, Eliot revises formal components of her earlier provincial novels that relied on an underlying rhythm of movement and stasis, by introducing a new kinetic imaginary that emphasizes movement, exile, and dispersal. Eliot’s utopian vision, however, is short lived, and under pressure of the contradictions of a critique of imperialism that repeats many of its own structures, in her final work her formal innovations collapse into a series of mere character studies, and her political ideals slump into cynicism.