George Eliot 
Romola 

Romola is a historical novel by George Eliot set in the fifteenth century, and is ‘a deep study of life in the city of Florence from an intellectual, artistic, religious, and social point of view’. The story takes place amidst actual historical events during the Italian Renaissance, and includes in its plot several notable figures from Florentine history.

About the author

Mary Ann Evans; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.

Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’ and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes[4] as the greatest novel in the English language.