Romola (Penguin Classics)

Product Information

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. sceptic, Matteo Franco, who wants hotter sauce than any of us.’‘Because he has a strong opinion of himself,’ flashes out Luigi, Its dense language has tested the patience of readers from the time of its publication. But the author herself said of it, “I swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood.” Bratti Ferravecchi – Trader and iron scrap dealer (hence the name). He encounters Tito Melema, who has just arrived in Florence. Various characters in the story often buy and sell various items through him. 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.

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.

Has the adaptation

Fearing Baldassare’s revenge, Tito buys a coat of mail to wear under his clothes. He begs Romola to sell her father’s library and leave Florence with him, and when Romola refuses, he secretly sells the library. Betrayed by her husband, Romola flees Florence, only to be met outside the city by Savonarola, who persuades her to honor her marriage vows and return to Tito. There was nothing “open” or provisional about her ménage, however. Rigorously identifying herself outside her writings as “Mrs Lewes” (rather than Mary Ann Evans, the name she was christened with), Eliot can sound sanctimonious in her pronouncements about monogamy and her condemnation of “light and easily broken ties”. She made her choice, and fortunately her leap proved a very successful one – Lewes may have been “tactless, vain and a little vulgar” (as a contemporary called him), but he also made an unfailingly loyal, kindly, protective and cheerful partner, who negotiated Eliot’s depressions sensitively and whose tastes and interests she shared. His successor, Cross, positively worshipped her. Why feature Romola in a celebration of the 200th anniversary of George Eliot’s birth? As an historical novel, it is atypical of Eliot’s output, and is the least popular of Eliot’s major works.

Dino de' Bardi (aka Fra Luca) – Estranged son of Bardo de' Bardi. His father had hoped that Dino would also study classical literature, but instead Dino became a Dominican friar, estranging him from his non-religious family. Just before his death, he warns Romola against a future marriage that will bring her peril. Romola is the fourth of Eliot’s full-length novels. It is set in Florence between the death of Lorenzo de Medici in April 1492 and the execution of Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola for heresy in May 1498. Thus, it takes in the first turbulent years of a republican government under Savonarola after 60 years of autocratic government by the Medicis, and Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494. Romola, the hero and amanuensis of her blind scholarly father, marries an opportunistic rogue and ends up isolated when her love for him turns to contempt and she furthermore loses trust in Savonarola. The discovery of duty in self-sacrifice is her solace. That the writing of Romola cost the author much we have from her own testimony: “I took unspeakable pains in preparing to write Romola — neglecting nothing that I could find that would help me to what I may call the “idiom” of Florence, in the largest sense one could stretch the world to.” a b Richard Hutton, The Spectator, 18 July 1863 in George Eliot: Godless Woman by Brian Spittles (Basingstoke, Hampshire; London: Macmillan Press, 1993) ISBN 0-333-57218-1.What does an author write after Middlemarch? While a lesser artist would have rested on her laurels, George Eliot conceived a new novel even more daring and ambitious: Daniel Deronda. She defied the Victorian reading public by vesting the story’s moral weight in Jewish characters and experimented with a literary form inspired by Kabbalist philosophy. The result is flawed, yet dazzling. Spirited Gwendolen Harleth is Eliot’s most compelling heroine: shallow and complex, symbolic and believable, very far from perfect and totally irresistible. Gwendolen’s horrifying marriage to a ruthlessly controlling man mirrors Eliot’s vision of an upper-class English culture that conceals moral hypocrisy, sexual violence, and the cruelties of empire beneath its polite veneer. Unlike her other novels, set in a nostalgia-tinged past, Daniel Deronda is bracingly modern and looked towards a new century. It depicted hysteria, neurosis and childhood trauma before Freud made those concepts mainstream. For me, a child of the 80s, Harleth prefigures Diana Spencer: charismatic, unstable, at once ordinary and archetypal. She shines in the limelight, secretly desperate in her fabulous clothes, destined to be trapped in a pathologically English marriage. Eliot could not have chosen a time of greater upheaval and change: the death of the powerful Lorenzo de Medici, invasion by Charles VIII of France and the spectacular rise and fall of the charismatic priest Savonarola. Her young heroine Romola journeys from naïve and cloistered daughter to gradual disillusionment with both Savonarola and her unscrupulous and self-serving husband.