ABSTRACT
Daniel Deronda's attempt to give a sense of Hebrew more nearly resembles the attempt of The Book of Mormon to mediate the reformed Egyptian of the ancient native American Moroni, its supposed original author. The author concerns the relations of aesthetic rather than thematic objects but both kinds of relations have implications for each other. Leavis, twelve years after arguing that the 'good part' of Daniel Deronda could and should be prised from the 'strongly, and very questionably, emotional' part and called 'Gwendolen Harleth', admitted that 'the surgery of disjunction would be a less simple and satisfactory affair. Daniel Deronda does not contradict this perception (tellingly, Gwendolen repeatedly sees herself in mirrors), but it adds the perception that a sense of geographical and cultural locality is a helpful basis from which to relate to the foreign, just as the perception of stars around one's 'homestead' is 'the best introduction to astronomy'.
