Editors Reads Verdict
Eliot's most laboured and least loved novel is also, in one respect, one of her most remarkable achievements: Tito Melema's gradual moral corruption, rendered increment by increment, is among the finest studies of how conscience erodes in all of Victorian fiction.
What We Loved
- Tito Melema's moral deterioration is one of the most precisely rendered studies of corruption in Victorian fiction
- The Florentine Renaissance setting is reconstructed with extraordinary historical care
- The relationship between politics, religion, and individual conscience is examined with unusual depth
- Savonarola is rendered as a complex figure — neither saint nor charlatan but both simultaneously
Minor Drawbacks
- The historical research weighs on the narrative — Eliot occasionally writes like a scholar rather than a novelist
- Romola herself is too saintly to be fully convincing as a psychological portrait
- The unfamiliar setting distances readers who find Victorian social fiction more accessible
- At 704 pages, the longest of Eliot's novels and the most demanding
Key Takeaways
- → Moral deterioration is not usually a single catastrophic choice but an accumulation of small ones
- → Political and religious idealism, however genuine, can become indistinguishable from tyranny
- → The past is always foreign — Eliot's Florence is a reminder that our assumptions are historically contingent
- → Scholarship and humanism are not insulation against political catastrophe
| Author | George Eliot |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penguin Classics |
| Pages | 704 |
| Published | July 6, 1863 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Classic Fiction, Historical Fiction, Renaissance Fiction |
Romola Review
Romola is the novel George Eliot most nearly broke herself writing. She spent two years in research before beginning, made repeated trips to Florence to verify details, and read everything available on fifteenth-century Florentine history, religion, and politics. When it appeared in serial form in 1862-63, it was — despite handsome payments from the publisher — widely regarded as her least successful work. She herself said that writing it had aged her ten years.
The effort shows, and this is both the novel’s limitation and its achievement. The Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Savonarola, and the Bonfire of the Vanities is reconstructed with a density that no other Victorian novelist attempted: the street life, the political factions, the religious controversies, the humanist scholarship of the period are all present in specific, verifiable detail. For a reader willing to enter this world, the historical immersion is extraordinary. For a reader who wants the unmediated psychological intimacy of Middlemarch, the historical apparatus can feel like a barrier.
The novel’s greatest achievement is its portrait of Tito Melema. Romola’s Greek husband is one of the most precise studies of moral deterioration in Victorian fiction — and the precision is in the increments. Tito does not make one catastrophic choice; he makes a series of small ones, each individually defensible, each making the next slightly easier. He betrays his adoptive father by degrees. He deceives Romola by degrees. He accommodates himself to tyranny by degrees. By the time his corruption is complete, he has not made a single choice that could not have been explained away in isolation. This is how most moral deterioration actually works, and almost no novelist renders it as honestly as Eliot does here.
Romola herself — the humanist’s daughter, the devoted wife, eventually the secular saint — is the novel’s weakness. She is written as an ideal rather than a person, and Eliot’s moral intelligence, so effective at entering unsympathetic consciousnesses, has less to work with when the subject is goodness itself. But the Renaissance setting frees Eliot to explore questions about conscience, political authority, and religious enthusiasm that the Victorian present, with its more settled social structures, would not have accommodated. Romola is the most demanding of Eliot’s novels and the least rewarded with popularity — but it is not without its particular grandeurs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Romola" about?
Set in fifteenth-century Florence during the life of Savonarola, Eliot's most researched novel follows Romola, daughter of a blind scholar, whose Greek husband Tito Melema is one of fiction's most precisely observed depictions of moral deterioration by small increments.
What are the key takeaways from "Romola"?
Moral deterioration is not usually a single catastrophic choice but an accumulation of small ones Political and religious idealism, however genuine, can become indistinguishable from tyranny The past is always foreign — Eliot's Florence is a reminder that our assumptions are historically contingent Scholarship and humanism are not insulation against political catastrophe
Is "Romola" worth reading?
Eliot's most laboured and least loved novel is also, in one respect, one of her most remarkable achievements: Tito Melema's gradual moral corruption, rendered increment by increment, is among the finest studies of how conscience erodes in all of Victorian fiction.
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