"George Eliot's humanity colors all her other gifts--her humor, her morality, and her exquisite
rhetoric."--Henry James

"There is no book of mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I swear by every sentence as having been
written with my best blood." Thus wrote George Eliot about Romola, the book which is central in her
career as a novelist and amongst her most colorful, fluent, and persuasive works.

Set in Florence in 1492, a time of great political and religious turmoil, Eliot's novel blends vivid fictional
characters with historical figures such as Savonarola, Machiavelli, and the Medicis. When Romola, the virtuous
daughter of a blind scholar, marries Tito Melema, a charismatic young Greek, she is bound to a man whose
escalating betrayals threaten to destroy all that she holds dear. Profoundly inspired by Savonarola's teachings,
then crushed by the religious leader's ultimate failure, Romola finds her salvation in noble self-sacrifice.