ABSTRACT
George Eliot's letters and journals, written while Romola was in its germinal stages, present a picture of self-inflicted torment. The exhaustive research for Romola was a punishing regime, scourging the conscious self, reaching beyond the speakable to the lifeblood. Romola's life is one of rupture, loss and disinheritance; however, she does eventually find reconciliation with her environment. Her story may be characterized, using Eliot's description of her preparations for the novel, as a search for a 'backbone', a means of holding the whole together. The traumatic process which led to Eliot's fusion with her material informs the story of its eponymous heroine. Romola attempts to reach beyond her orphanage, to return to the physical oneness she experienced before her trauma: 'She longed for that repose in mere sensation which she had sometimes dreamed of in the sultry afternoons of her early girlhood, when she had fancied herself floating naiad-like in the waters'.
