From her first appearance robed in
her meek despair, through all her subsequent relations with Deronda, her
brother, and Gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the same
tender meekness, the same full acceptance of the life of a Jewess as--in
harmony with the life of her race--one of "sufferance." Even as her
spirits gladden in that sunny Meyrick home, with its delicious interiors,
and brighten under the noble-hearted musician Klesmer's encouragement,
the brightness refers to something entirely without herself. In one
sense far more acquainted with the evil that is in the world than
Gwendolen with all her alleged worldliness, it is her shrinking from the
least approach to this that prompts her strange, apparently hopeless
flight in search of the mother she had loved so dearly. Her sad, humble
complaints that she has not been a good Jewess, because she has been
inevitably cut off from the use of Jewish books, and restrained by her
scoundrel father from attendance at Jewish worship, find their answer in
her deep unfailing sense of her share in the national doom of suffering.
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