An Appreciation of Daniel Deronda Chapter 22: Austen's Heritage and Eliot's Innovation

The present paper aims at making clear how George Eliot owes a debt in style to Jane Austen in her character portrayal. Taking up Austen’s Emma and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, we consider the qualities of prose style that are characteristic of the respective writers as seen in these novels. A comparative analysis of their discourses has brought to light a marked tendency on both sides to use negative expressions and the subjunctive. These common traits are surmised to meet an artistic challenge of creating ambiguity in the characters’psychological situations. Eliot, while inheriting Austen’s stylized English, utilizes scientific phraseology to give voice to the human drama in late nineteenth century England. Thus she adds physiological dimensions to what Austen has established. We attempt to prove this point on the basis of discourse analysis.