Romola Paperback - 1997

Summary

First line

MORE than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid springtime of 1492, we are sure that the angel of the dawn, as he travelled with broad slow wing from the Levant to the of Hercules, and from the summits of the Caucasus across all the snowy alpine ridges to the dark nakedness of the western isles, saw nearly the same outline of firm land and unstable sea-saw the same great mountain shadows on the same valleys as he has seen to-day-saw olive mounts, and pine forests, and the broad plains green with young corn or rain-freshened grass-saw the domes and spires of cities rising by the river sides or mingled with the sedge-like masts on the many-curved sea coast, in the same spots where they rise to-day.

From the rear cover

'There is no book of mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood.'. So wrote George Eliot of Romola, the novel which argues her most profound and utopian vision of the position of women. Romola's patient subservience to her scholar-father Bardo, her unhappy marriage to supple and treacherous Tito, and her passionate intellectual and spiritual awakening take place in Renaissance Florence which, like Victorian Britain, was caught up in a period of ferment and transition. Romola appeared in 1862-3 to high praise by Victorians from Tennyson and Trollope to Henry James, and discerning modern readers will recognize it as George Eliot's first mature masterpiece. In her introduction to this new edition, Dorothea Barrett explores the issues of gender and learning, desire and scholarship, and the interweaving of history and fiction which she identifies at the centre of the novel.