Hospitality in Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda

Abstract

This article considers two works by Eliot, Silas Marner, her most provincial of novels, and Daniel Deronda, the most cosmopolitan, through the lens of hospitality. Both novels repeatedly stage scenes in which a stranger arrives, and is welcomed or excluded by their hosts. Through these scenes, both novels examine questions regarding refuge, asylum, and settlement, as well as the politics of kinship and the exclusion of women from democratic society. This enables us to read Daniel Deronda as an ‘inquiry’ into the conditions that make the act of colonial settlement seem to be inevitable.