Definition

George Eliot’s historical romance of the Florentine Renaissance, Romola (1862–1863), marks a transition in Eliot’s career from her closely drawn early novels of the nineteenth-century English countryside to a monumental project of historical research and imagination that merged major historical figures and developments with invented characters and plots.

While the novel was less popular than Eliot’s English novels with her contemporary public, it reaffirmed Eliot’s power among her fellow writers, such as Anthony Trollope and Robert Browning, and she later described it as “written with my best blood.”

Introduction

George Eliot’s historical romance of the Florentine Renaissance, Romola (1862–1863), marks a transition in Eliot’s career from her closely drawn early novels of the nineteenth-century English countryside to a monumental project of historical research and imagination that merges major historical figures and developments with invented characters and plots. Romola was illustrated by the painter Frederic Leighton and published first in serialized form in the The Cornhill Magazine from July 1862 to August 1863 and in three volumes by Smith, Elder, and Co. in 1863. While the novel was less popular than Eliot’s English novels with her contemporary public, it reaffirmed Eliot’s power among her fellow writers, such as Anthony Trollope and Robert Browning, and she later described it as “written with my best blood.”

Writing with the tailwind of English enthusiasm for the Italian Risorgimento, which had seen in the previous year the victory of Garibaldi and the pronouncement of a unified Kingdom of Italy, George Eliot, like many Victorian writers, artists, and critics, identified in Renaissance Italy an image of their own moment, as Hilary Fraser has demonstrated. Renaissance Italy served as a mirror for their fascination with preserving and revivifying the past, with the meeting between faith and culture, with the writing of history, and with the human possibilities of art and language. Set in 1492, in the immediate aftermath of the death of Lorenzo de Medici, Florence’s celebrated ruler and patron of humanistic learning and the arts, Romola traces the political and philosophical confrontation between the ascetic, mystical Christianity of the fiery Dominican reformer Girolamo Savonarola and the scholarly embrace of classical antiquity, represented primarily by Bardo de Bardi, the father of the heroine. Romola navigates a space between these two causes, both of which are represented as flawed by the egoism of the men who advance them. Eliot’s early evangelical education and her later immersion in the philosophical thought of Auguste Comte (Course of Positive Philosophy) and her translation of such major texts as Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus: Critically Examined positioned her to seek in her fiction a humanist ideal deeply informed by Christian ethics, with an emphasis on altruism and even self-sacrifice. In Romola, this humanist ideal would reject the claims of prophecy that Savonarola represents and put in its stead a faith in the collective heritage of a human knowledge, vivified by the active sympathy that Bardo lacks.

While Romola dramatizes a historical philosophical confrontation in which the heroine must assert her claims against both her father, the scholar Bardo and the monk Savonarola, the novel also focuses on the perils of marriage. In dramatizing Romola’s plight in relation to an unfaithful husband, the novel reflects on the Woman Question and the politics of marriage in a way that was not lost upon its Victorian readers, some of whom even criticized it for anachronism. Romola’s husband, Tito, is revealed to be a cunning political double agent, whose talent for doubleness extends to marriage as well, as he moves back and forth between Romola and his first common-law wife, Tessa, and their children. The contest between these two marriages afforded Eliot an opportunity to critique the confines of nineteenth-century marital law, particularly regarding divorce, which impacted Eliot and her partner, George Henry Lewes. Romola is set free from Tito only with his death.

The novel’s historical and fictional plotlines coincide with Romola outliving all the men who have educated her, but who also make impossible, self-serving claims upon her: Bardo marries her to Tito in the hopes that his son-in-law will carry out the scholarly plans upon which he has staked his reputation; Savonarola demands Romola’s utter loyalty to his prophetic authority in the name of a self-sacrificial Christianity; Tito betrays Romola and denies her the single request to preserve her father’s library in his name; and finally, Tito’s adoptive father, Baldassarre, after Tito publicly denies him, seeks Romola’s help in exacting vengeance on the one who has betrayed them both. The novel ends with a vision of Romola as a surviving Madonna, supplying aid to the hungry and the diseased Florence, and adopting feckless Tessa and her children without divulging her true position in relation to Tito. In Romola, George Eliot thus radically proposes that an extraordinary woman may resolve Christianity’s humanist possibilities –love and duty – without necessitating an atonement by self-sacrificial death.

Summary

Romola marks the point at which George Eliot had achieved a literary position in which she could write what she wanted as she wanted. She renegotiated her initial offer of £10,000 for its publication (an offer she believed to be “handsomer than almost any terms ever offered to a writer of Fiction”) in order to get the serialization scheme that best suited her needs, and she wrote a novel that won her the esteem of the most discerning readers of her time.

Cross-References