I was winning until I met your gaze…
Gambling at the roulette tables of the Kursaal, Gwendolen Harleth glances up to meet Daniel Deronda’s arresting stare. Striking, selfish and wilful, she is at that moment the mistress of her destiny. Years later, the flawed heroine and true protagonist of Eliot’s last great novel writes her confessional to the man whose ever-imagined gaze has prevailed throughout her life. The egotism, naiveté and sensitivity of her blazing youth is evoked with bittersweet wisdom; a passionate remembrance of the events leading up to the marriage that broke her spirit, and the loss of the man who broke her heart.
Moving, original and elegant, this is a bravura re-imagining of the life of one of English literature’s most multi-faceted and contradictory heroines.
