Romola

I'm not sure what moved Henry James to pronounce this George Eliot's best work. It isn't. It's like saying The Beautiful and the Damned was Scott Fitzgerald's best work or Between the Acts was Virginia Woolf's. Sometimes literary criticism can acquire the forensic objectivity of science. There's no......more

4.50 ⭐️ (rnd ⬆️) — In the pantheon of English literature, George Eliot stands as a colossus, and "Romola" is a testament to her unparalleled mastery of narrative and character development. Eliot’s considered prose is free-flowing, descriptive & somehow always managed to catch the environmental textu......more

I wrote my Master's thesis on this book, so I am aware of the long history of bad reviews for this quite revolutionary novel for George Eliot. The language is definitely difficult (contemporary reviewers complained of not being able to read it without a dictionary), but the rewards are definitely wo......more

If you’re looking to read your first George Eliot, don’t start with Romola. In 1866, Henry James called it Eliot’s greatest novel to date (and that means greater than The Mill on the Floss, which opinion is goofy). “It is decidedly the most important,” he wrote of the novel, “--not the most entertai......more