Levine, Caroline, and Mark W. Turner, eds. 1998. From author to text: Re-reading George Eliot’s Romola. London: Ashgate.

If you do not want us to use your data for our or third parties you will have the opportunity to withhold your consent to this when you provide your details to us on the form on which we collect your data. Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw in the 1994 TV adaptation of Middlemarch. Photograph: Shaun Higson/Culture/Alamy If you only read one, it should beGeorge Eliot herself described her labour in writing the novel as one about which she could "swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent care for veracity of which my nature is capable". [7] She reportedly spent eighteen months contemplating and researching the novel, [5] including several excursions to Florence. The attention to detail exhibited in the novel was a focus of both praise and criticism. Anthony Trollope, having read the first instalment of Romola, expressed wonder at the toil Eliot must have "endured in getting up the work", but also cautioned her against excessive erudition, urging her not to "fire too much over the heads of her readers". [7]

Savonarola was the overshadowing figure of Florentine life at that time, as he is the overshadowing figure of Romola. Later, as he walks through the crowded streets, Tito rescues Tessa from some jostling revelers. When he leaves her, he meets the strange monk he had seen gazing at him from the crowd earlier in the afternoon. The monk, Fra Luca, gives him a note that has been brought from a pilgrim in the Near East; Tito wonders why he finds the monk’s face so familiar. The note is from Baldassare, who pleads with Tito to rescue him from slavery. Unwilling to give up his happy life in Florence, Tito ignores his foster father’s plea. Goodlad, Lauren M.E. 2015. The adulterous geopolitical aesthetic. In The Victorian geopolitical aesthetic: Realism, sovereignty, and transnational experience, 161–207. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bardo de' Bardi – Blind classical scholar living in Florence. He has one estranged son, Dino, and a daughter, Romola. Bardo is a descendant of the once-powerful Bardi family, but is living in poverty with his daughter, who helps him with his classical studies. He is an ally of the Medici family. He maintains a classical library, and tries to preserve it beyond his own death.To provide you with information requested from us, relating to our products or services. To provide information on other products which we feel may be of interest to you, where you have consented to receive such information. Skidelsky, William (13 May 2012). "The 10 best historical novels". The Guardian . Retrieved 30 July 2023. Whereas 6,000 copies of The Mill on the Floss had sold within the first two months of publication, it took a whole year to sell 1,714 copies of Romola, and by September 1865, it was being remaindered. Yet the book’s very atypicality renders it interesting. The novel first appeared in fourteen parts published in Cornhill Magazine from July 1862 (vol. 6, no. 31) to August 1863 (vol. 8, no. 44), and was first published as a book, in three volumes, by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1863.