Daniel Deronda is a romance, and hence differs in kind, conception, scope, circumstance and form from her other works.  It is less a study of character than most of her other works, has more of adventure and action; and while it is no less realistic, yet it has higher ideal aims, and seeks to interpret what ought to be.

At least three distinct purposes may be seen running through the book, which blend into and confirm each other:  to show the all-powerful influence of heredity, that blood will assert itself as more effective than any conditions of social environment or education; to indicate that ideals, subjective feelings and sentiments form the reality and the substance of religion, and that tradition affords the true medium of its expression; and to contrast a form of social life based on individualism with one based on tradition.  The aim of Daniel Deronda, however, is many-sided, and cannot be expressed in a few phrases.  It is too vital with life, touches the emotions and sentiments too often, has an ideal motive too large, to be dismissed with a quickly spoken word of contempt.  Professor Dowden, one of her best and most sympathetic critics, has said that it is “an homage to the emotions rather than to the intellect of man.  Her feeling finds expression not only in occasional gnomic utterances in which sentiments are declared to be the best part of the world’s wealth, and love is spoken of as deeper than reason, and the intellect is pronounced incapable of ascertaining the validity of claims which rest upon loving instincts of the heart, or else are baseless.  The entire work possesses an impassioned aspect, an air of spiritual prescience, far more than the exactitude of science.  The main forces which operate in it are sympathies, aspirations, ardors; and ideas chiefly as associated with these.”  The object aimed at is ideal and religious, much more than intellectual and scientific, to show how necessary is religion, how weak and imperfect is man when the ideal side of his nature is undeveloped.  It makes clear the author’s conviction concerning the importance of religion, that she prized its spiritual hopes, found satisfaction in its enthusiasms and aspirations.  When Gwendolen was cast down in utter dejection, all of joy and delight the world had afforded her gone, and she felt the greatest need of something to comfort and sustain her in her distrust of self and the world, Deronda said to her, “The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities.”

The religion inculcated, to be sure, is not that of faith in a personal God and a personal immortality, but that which is based on the mystery of life and nature, impressed on the sensitive soul of man in fears, sorrows, hopes, aspirations, and built up into great ideals and institutions through tradition. Daniel Deronda gives us the gospel of altruism, a new preaching of love to man. Daniel Deronda proves as no other writing has ever done, what is the charm and the power of these ideas when dissociated from any spiritual hopes which extend beyond humanity.