Novel: Romola

Overview
Set in late fifteenth-century Florence during the tumultuous years surrounding the fall of the Medici and the rise and execution of the reforming friar Girolamo Savonarola, George Eliot’s Romola is a richly researched historical novel that charts a woman’s moral and spiritual awakening amid civic upheaval. The story follows Romola de’ Bardi, daughter of a blind classical scholar, and her marriage to the brilliant but unscrupulous adventurer Tito Melema. Through Romola’s disillusionment and renewed commitment to duty, the novel explores the tension between humanist learning, religious fervor, and personal conscience.

Setting and Premise
Florence in the 1490s is a city poised between Renaissance humanism and puritan reform. After Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death and the exile of his heir, the city oscillates between factional strife and visionary ideals, culminating in Savonarola’s brief theocratic influence and catastrophic downfall. This civic drama forms the backdrop for an intimate narrative about truth, betrayal, and responsibility.

Main Figures
Romola, raised amid her father Bardo’s veneration for antiquity, embodies intellectual rigor and ethical seriousness. Tito Melema, a charming Greek-Italian scholar and opportunist, becomes the darling of Florence’s salons and councils while concealing betrayals that corrode his marriage and public standing. Baldassarre, Tito’s neglected adoptive father, emerges as the living rebuke to Tito’s self-preserving falsehoods. Around them move historical and fictional figures, including Savonarola, the painter Piero di Cosimo, and Tessa, a naive country girl whose entanglement with Tito exposes the human cost of his duplicity.

Plot
Tito arrives in Florence after a shipwreck, carrying jewels he quickly converts into patronage and position. Taken up by Bardo de’ Bardi for his learning, he wins Romola’s hand while suppressing the fact that he has abandoned Baldassarre, captured alongside him, to slavery. He later denies Baldassarre publicly to safeguard his own advancement. Tito’s ascent hinges on endless adaptation to shifting factions; he flatters Mediceans, then trims his sails under the new republic inspired by Savonarola, ever careful to preserve himself.

Romola enters the marriage with hopes of a partnership grounded in truth and intellect, only to discover Tito’s pragmatic lies. Her brother Dino, who has become a Dominican under the name Fra Luca, warns her in a prophetic encounter that her husband will be a source of spiritual peril. The warning proves apt. Tito secretly seduces and mock-marries Tessa during carnival and fathers her children, a deception that coexists with his polished domestic life.

As Florence passes through bonfires and sermons, conspiracies and reprisals, Romola’s inward struggle intensifies. She uncovers Tito’s betrayal of Baldassarre and his duplicity with Tessa. Despairing, she flees by sea but is turned back, moved by human suffering and by a sense that flight cannot absolve her of responsibility. Returning to Florence, she aligns her life with service, influenced yet not subsumed by Savonarola’s call to moral renewal.

Tito’s compromises converge upon him. Baldassarre, half-mad with wrong and hardship, hunts him through the city’s alleys. In a final chase along the Arno, Baldassarre drags Tito into the river; the opportunist’s talent for evasion ends in the irretrievable current. Savonarola, too, falls, tried and executed, his failure underscoring the fragility of public virtue.

Themes and Resolution
Romola’s path moves from filial piety and classical erudition to a lived ethic of compassion. The novel weighs humanism’s beauty against its insufficiency, religious zeal against its dangers, and political cleverness against the demands of conscience. After Tito’s death, Romola assumes care for Tessa and the children, extending forgiveness into concrete duty. She refuses illusions, whether aesthetic, doctrinal, or romantic, and seeks a steadier good within a broken city. The ending affirms a moral vision grounded in honest responsibility, with Romola as a quietly heroic figure modeling fidelity to truth amid the flux of history.