Until now we have concentrated our attention on Eliot's works of realist fiction. While it is true that Eliot's major achievements are within that genre – indeed, she provides us with the most accomplished examples of the realist novel in the English language – she also wrote a number of works of fiction that do not fall easily into the category. These include her supernatural novella, ‘The Lifted Veil’ (1859), and her last work, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879). We should add to this group, too, her late novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), a work whose formal complexities have been considered by some as flaws or mistakes within its construction. In recent years, these formally eccentric or aberrant works have attracted a good deal of critical attention which, especially in the case of ‘The Lifted Veil’, has lifted them from relative obscurity.

In this chapter we will focus on the most substantial of these works, Daniel Deronda, and consider it in the context of these other supposedly eccentric works. Such a grouping makes sense because, as we shall see, in all of these works Eliot explores themes and issues that could not easily be presented within the interpretative model of realism. The world conjured by these works is much more uncertain and volatile than that of the previous novels, and is inhabited by different kinds of people: those who can see into the future, like Latimer in ‘The Lifted Veil’; or those whose destiny is prescribed not by social experience but by racial inheritance, even when that inheritance is unknown, as is the case for Daniel Deronda; or the shadowy acquaintances of Theophrastus Such, the inhabitants of ‘crowded London drawing room[s]’, whose divergent ‘varieties of history’ have no more substance than Theophrastus cares to imagine (TS 20). In the other works, material circumstances and benign human agency conspired to harness the forces of change for social progress, but in these works, as we shall see, people are subject to influences that are beyond their control and which divert the steady path of improvement.

As in previous chapters, we will contextualize Daniel Deronda by considering it in the light of some of the areas of contemporary debate on which Eliot drew in its composition.