Reading notes: 'Romola'
- It's absolutely wonderful; for me, somewhere between Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss. From what I can gather, Romola tends to be considered (when it's thought of at all) only as a curiosity ("hey, George Eliot wrote a novel about 1490s Florence"). This is first-rate Victorian novel, though: meaningful ethical inquiry, rich satisfying plot, courtship, and all that.
- Reading this took a lot more effort than reading other books, in part because I don't know very much about 1490s Florence,1 and in part because it's pretty long (560ish medium-sized pages in the edition I read). There are plenty of characters, some of their names are similar, small plot details matter a lot, and Eliot assumes a fair amount of background knowledge. Moreover, she's such a precise writer that it's worth lingering over sentences and paragraphs.
- This is the most successful philosophical novel I've ever read, for some hard-to-define notion of "philosophical novel." It addresses, directly and at length, questions like "What does the utilitarian life look like, and is it a good life?," "How are human beings actually motivated to life by principles over long periods of time?," and "What are the prospects for the life of what is sometimes called 'sophisticated hedonism'?"
- So, it's worth understanding that this is a book set in, and about, 15th-century Florence, but that attempts to address up-to-date ethical questions (up-to-date in Victorian England, that is). There is no conflict between those two things, but prospective readers ought to know it, and I haven't seen many summaries of the book that make it clear.
- The proximate cause of my reading Romola was that "Read a work of historical fiction" appeared in my library's summer reading Bingo card. I'm grateful to have been nudged in this direction, even though I didn't finish the book in time to tick off the square. This book seems to me badly underrated, and my sense of Renaissance Florence is much richer and more vivid now.
George Eliot is wonderful, this book is wonderful, and I'm now more eager to know what other "minor works" I've been overlooking.
In case you want to calibrate: I knew who Savonarola is but only in the broadest outlines, and I couldn't have told you about the relationship with Charles VIII of France or any details of the conflicts with the Pope. I know a little about the Medici but (e.g.) could not have told you who "Piero the Unfortunate" is or any meaningful details about Savonarola's relationship to the Medici. I know a bit about Machiavelli but couldn't have told you Piero di Cosimo's profession.↩