ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace that Romola, George Eliot’s fifth work of fiction, cost her untold pains in the writing. John Cross reports her as saying: ‘I began it as a young woman, — I finished it an old woman’.1 In this novel she moved away from her family memories and the relatively recent English past to Savonarola’s Florence, and a massively studied argument about the Renaissance. Some of her contemporaries, and many readers since, have deplored this shift: we readily recall lapidary phrases like Henry James’s ‘it smells of the lamp’, forgetting that this comment follows his description of Romola as ‘on the whole the finest thing she wrote’.2 It is this novel too which generated Barbara Hardy’s famous observation: ‘Romola is undoubtedly a book which it is more interesting to analyse than simply to read’.3
