Daniel Deronda is the last of George Eliot's novels, and the one that describes her contemporaries. Mary Anne Evans, who became Marian, Polly to her intimates, and concealed her feminine identity under the pseudonym of George Eliot, was a schoolgirl at the time represented in Middlemarch . The religion described in Scenes of Clerical Life and in Adam Bede was in substance hers until 1841. When in 1856 she began to tell tales about it she had already translated The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by D.F. Strauss and The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach. But she could write of ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism’ as one who had experienced it from within when the Evangelical revival stood for serious religion, for the conviction of sin.

In Daniel Deronda ‘hurrying march of crowded Time towards the world-changing battle of Sadowa’ where Prussia defeated Austria in July 1866, dates Daniel's wait in Genoa for his unknown mother, who will tell him that her father and his were both Jews, like Mirah who in the July of the year before stepped into his boat opposite Kew Gardens with the cloak that she had soaked in the river to hasten her drowning. Something has been told beforehand of his background at home with Sir Hugo Mallinger at Topping Abbey, at Eton and at Cambridge and a German university, and of his suspicion of his illegitimacy; but his meetings with Mirah, with her brother Mordccai, and with Gwendolen Harleth, who became the wife and then the widow of Grandcourt, Sir Hugo’s nephew and the heir apparent to his baronetcy, all belong to 1865 and 1866.