At Home in Narrative: The Kept Mistress in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda

Abstract

This essay argues that in her novel Daniel Deronda, George Eliot offers her kept mistress character a compassionate context, integrates her into the narrative in a meaningful way, and locates her in the domestic space of a middle-class housewife. She thus performs an intervention on levels of both narrative structure and content that challenges conventional Victorian ideology and creates a new narrative for kept mistresses, who had previously been invisible in both nineteenth-century fiction and nonfiction.[1][1] I am grateful to Margaret Breen, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, and their readers for this opportunity, and for the generosity of Amy Schlag, Katherine Montwieler, Michelle Scatton-Tessier, Marissa Bolin, Susan McCaffray, and the British Women’s Writers Association and Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies communities