Halm-Eberstein, Leonora, Princess

Daniel Deronda's unknown mother, a famous prima donna known as Alcharisi, who bitterly resented being a Jewess. "She was covered, except as to her face and part of her arms, with black lace hanging loosely from the summit of her whitening hair to the long train stretching from her tall figure. Her arms, naked from the elbow, except for some rich bracelets, were folded before her, and the fine poise of her head made it look handsomer than it really was . . . her eyes were piercing and her face so mobile that the next moment she might look like a different person . . . there was a play of the brow and nostril which made a tacit language . . . She was a remarkablelooking being . . . Her worn beauty had a strangeness in it as if she were not quite a human mother, but a Melusina, who had ties with some world which is independent of ours. . "This woman's nature was one in which all feeling—and all the more when it was tragic as well as real—immediately be came matter of conscious representation; experience immediately passed into drama, and she acted her own emotions. In a minor degree this is nothing un common, but in the Princess the acting had a rare perfection of physiognomy, voice, and gesture." Brought up by a stern and orthodox father who believed intensely in his race and in the inferiority of women, she had come to hate both his authority and the thought of being a Jewess. At her father's wish she had married her cousin Charisi, but had bent his gentle nature to her will and had gone on the stage, where her wonderful voice and acting made her the leading prima donna of her time. With all her ambition centred on a great career she had no love for her baby (Daniel), and after her husband's early death she persuaded Sir Hugo Mallinger, one of her admirers, to take Daniel to England and bring him up in ignorance of his birth. Some time after, thinking that her voice was failing, she married the Prince Halm-Eberstein and retired from the stage. Believing that she had done the best thing for Daniel in having him brought up as a Christian Englishman, she had never intended to reveal herself to him, but when suffering from an incurable disease she becomes conscience stricken at the thought that she has thwarted her father's desire to have a grandson, and summons Deronda to meet her at Genoa, where she makes her self and his race known to him without responding in any way to the affection which he offers her. In his Life and Writings of Isaac Disraeli, by his Son, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, gives an account of Isaac Disraeli's mother, which in some respects, particularly her intense resentment of her race and its social disadvantages and her lack of affection for her son, so resembles the Princess Halm-Eberstein, that it seems probable that George Eliot must have taken some touches in the portrait of Deronda's mother, and in the scene be tween mother and son, from this original. (See Disraeli's Life and Writings of Mr. Disraeli; also article in Temple Bar, vol. 49, p. 542.

<em>Daniel Deronda</em>

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