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. Romolawas...
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References
Blumberg, Ilana M. 2013. Sacrificial Value: Beyond the Cash Nexus in George Eliot’s Romola. In Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, ed. Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport, 60–76. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Bonaparte, Felicia. 1979. The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination. New York: New York University Press.
Fraser, Hilary. 1992. The Victorians and Renaissance Italy. 152 Cambridge: Blackwell.
Goodlad, Lauren M.E. 2015. The adulterous geopolitical aesthetic. In The Victorian geopolitical aesthetic: Realism, sovereignty, and transnational experience, 161–207. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levine, Caroline, and Mark W. Turner, eds. 1998. From author to text: Re-reading George Eliot’s Romola. London: Ashgate.
Malachuk, Daniel S. 2008. Romola and Victorian liberalism. Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (1): 41–57.
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Blumberg, I.M. (2022). Romola (Eliot). In: Scholl, L., Morris, E. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78318-1_7
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