Romola

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.

Savonarola: Neither Saint Nor Villain

Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who effectively ruled Florence in the years between the Medici’s fall and his own execution in 1498, is one of the most resistant figures in history to simple moral evaluation. He was genuinely devout, genuinely concerned with the corruption of the Church, and capable of extraordinary personal austerity. He was also a demagogue who burned books and artworks, who used the fervour of his followers to terrorise political opponents, and whose certainty of divine mission made him increasingly indifferent to the humans whose fates his certainty determined. Eliot renders both of these things simultaneously, without resolving them into a verdict.

This is the novel’s most sustained achievement. The Savonarola of Romola is a complex historical figure rendered with the same psychological interiority Eliot gives to her fictional characters: we can follow his reasoning, understand his commitments, see the genuine faith and the genuine pathology coexisting in the same consciousness. He is neither the saint his followers believed in nor the charlatan his enemies insisted on. He is a man whose virtues and failings are structurally connected — whose certainty of divine mission is both the source of his power and the mechanism of his destruction.

The Cost of Research

The two years of research Eliot undertook before writing Romola were not merely preparation but a form of wrestling with the material that left marks on the prose. There are passages in the novel where the historical learning weighs too visibly — where Eliot is demonstrating command of her subject rather than being transparent to it. Her contemporary reviewers noticed this, and it has limited the novel’s readership ever since. Romola is not a comfortable read; it demands more context than any of Eliot’s other novels and provides more of it than any of them needs.

Yet the research also made possible what the novel does that her English social fiction could not: a sustained examination of the relationship between political idealism and political tyranny, between genuine faith and its institutional expressions, between the humanist tradition of careful scholarship and the demagogic tradition that can destroy it overnight. These are questions that the Victorian present, with its greater social stability and entrenched institutions, could not have accommodated with the same directness. Romola is Eliot at her most ambitious and most strained — a monument to what Victorian novelists could attempt when they were willing to accept the full costs of their ambitions.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — 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.

Florence at the Turn of an Age

Romola (1863) is Eliot’s great historical novel, set in Florence in the 1490s amid the upheavals of Savonarola’s theocratic rebellion and the fall of the Medici. The plot turns on the charming, self-serving Greek scholar Tito Melema, whose escalating betrayals corrupt the noble Romola who loves him. The most heavily researched of Eliot’s books, it is also her most demanding, reconstructing a whole vanished world to test her characters against the pressures of history.