Daniel Deronda (published 1876) is George Eliot\u27s last and in many ways most controversial novel. Contemporary readers resent her writing anything which would compete with Middlemarch, an immensely popular novel and Deronda\u27s immediate predecessor. Even today Deronda suffers due to its location in the George Eliot canon. Whereas Middlemarch is universally acclaimed, Daniel Deronda is often dismissed as a failure (limited or otherwise) when it is compared with the book Virginia Woolf calls one of the few English novels written for grown-up people
