ABSTRACT
FROM FEBRUARY TO SEPTEMBER OF 1876, BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE IN ENGLAND and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in America carried simultaneous installments of George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda. By the time of Deronda’s publication, Eliot was one of England’s most celebrated fiction writers and was equally esteemed in America, as evidenced by the widespread sale and discussion of her work, especially Adam Bede.1 But with the advent of Deronda, her new novel quickly became her most anticipated, debated, and lucrative.2 Each installment was closely observed by the media. Periodicals on both sides of the ocean (e.g., The Athenaeum, The Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator) followed each monthly episode with a commentary or a review, in recognition that their readers were taking part in what one reviewer, Edwin Whipple, called “an important literary event” (31); and The Edinburgh Review captured the tenor of the “universal extension of interest” in Deronda by detailing “the anxiety of critics who have not even waited for its completion, but have discussed it piecemeal as an object of national interest” (450).3 Put simply, Daniel Deronda was the transatlantic talk of the town.
