Romola
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a historical novel by George Eliot, published serially in the Cornhill Magazine, 1862-1863, and in book form in 1864. The Cornhill Magazine paid Pound 7,000, more than $33,000, for the first right of publication. By many Romola is considered George Eliot's greatest novel. It is unquestionably the greatest of those for which she made special study. The earlier novels, which are earnest and truthful delineations of English life in Warwickshire, are of so different a type that it is hardly possible to compare them with Romola. Without doubt, Romola ranks among the greatest historical novels in the English language. It is a picture of Florentine life during the fifteenth century, when the city was stirred by the teachings of Savonarola. It involves the struggle between the Medici and French power, while the contrast between the paganism of the Renaissance and austere, self-denying Christianity is vividly shown. The character of Tito Melema, a young Greek, who fascinates the imagination by the brilliancy and beauty of his promising youth, and who, by his love of pleasure and selfish power, by his fear of pain and renunciation of any sort, comes at last to crime and to a wasted manhood, is the real center of interest. Romola, his wife, is a stately and beautiful woman of noble character. It is said that George Eliot studied two hundred volumes in preparing to write Romola. Beside this, she made a journey to Florence and spent several weeks there. More than any other of her works, Romola exhausted her vital energy. She spent two years in its production, but said of it, "I began it a young woman; I finished it an old woman."
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's confidence in 1910 that "by many Romola is considered George Eliot's greatest novel" has not survived. Twentieth-century criticism decisively promoted Middlemarch instead he one of the few English novels written for grown-up people, in Virginia Woolf's 1919 phrase and today Middlemarch is routinely placed at or near the top of lists of English fiction while Romola, weighed down by the two hundred volumes of research Aiton admires, is the least read and least taught of Eliot's mature novels. What has been rehabilitated is the author rather than this book: Eliot's standing recovered strongly after the mid-twentieth century, and the £7,000 Cornhill paid remains one of the largest sums given for a Victorian serial. The account of the plot, of Tito Melema and of Savonarola's Florence still describes the novel accurately.
Written for this edition, 2026.