ABSTRACT
Bonnie McMullen The only way to get to Ronda in 1867 was by horseback across the mountains from Malaga, Granada or Gibraltar. George Eliot did not go there. Nevertheless, Ronda's name, commemorated in the title of her last novel and the patronym of its hero, raises questions about George Eliot's imaginative and actual involvement with Spain that have never been answered. What David Carroll has called 'the radically new mode in which Daniel Deronda is written'1 has challenged readers since its first publication and eluded most attempts at precise definition. The foregrounding of national and international issues, juxtaposed with an urgent probing of psychological and religious questions, gives it a wider emotional and intellectual field of reference than the earlier novels. These thematic concerns, realized in the novel through a pervasive use of spatial and dramatic devices, take it above and beyond a world in which most readers can feel quite at home. This discomfort is, to some extent, caused by the wider geographical and historical framework the novel employs, which is related to a different concept of personal identity in the characters. The title itself focuses on the relation between person and place in a way that, by its allusive obscurity, presents a challenge to the reader. The road to Ronda was the road not taken, but the imaginative terrain in which it lies constitutes the subject matter of the novel. An examination of George Eliot's apprehension of this pay sage moralise may also open an unexplored passage to the world of Daniel Deronda
For Marian Lewes, Spain was an enthusiasm of middle age. She had just passed her forty-seventh birthday when she wrote to Sara Hennell at the end of 1866:
So far, however, the 'new vistas' opened by a knowledge of Spanish had not resulted in anything specific. On the contrary, months of work on The Spanish Gypsy had left her 'very miserable about my soul as well as body',3 prompting Lewes to take the manuscript away from her in February 1865. Within weeks her gaze was redirected from inspiring but distant Iberian vistas to the byways and valleys of provincial England which she had already so masterfully claimed in previous fiction. The Spanish Gypsy was only postponed, however, and once Felix Holt was completed she returned to it with renewed purpose. 'I am swimming in Spanish history and literature' she wrote (Letters, IV, 305), somewhat ominously, to John Blackwood on 6 September 1866, hoping, perhaps, that such strenuous immersion would supply the ingredient 'wanting' to give life to 'the right locus and historic conditions' (Letters, IV, 301) she had described to Frederic Harrison.
