This just in: the Oxford World's Classics edition of
Romola is out of print. Does that mean it is losing (or should I say winning?) the battle for "least read George Eliot novel"? Admittedly, it does contain the truly terrible line of dialogue "you are as welcome as the cheese to the macaroni" (an Italian friend of mine assures me that in Italian, this idiomatic expression does not sound nearly so, well, cheesy)--but
Romola is a truly extraordinary novel in many ways. Romola herself can be a bit tiresome in her pursuit of virtue (she's a bit like a trial run at Dorothea Brooke), but even she has some great dramatic moments--the encounter with Savonarola when she's finally seized the courage to run away from her unworthy husband among them. And that unworthy husband, Tito Melema, may be George Eliot's greatest portrait of an egotist whose small concessions to self-interest accumulate until he achieves a truly villainous status. And the "dead hand" that in
Middlemarch is a metaphor for men's grasping efforts to control events from beyond the grave, is literalized in
Romola in this extraordinary scene between Tito and the adoptive father he believed long dead and thus unable to expose his self-serving lies:
"An escape of prisoners," said Lorenzo Tornabuoni, as he and his party turned round just against the steps of the Duomo, and saw a prisoner rushing by them. "The people are not content with having emptied the Bargello the other day. If there is no other authority in sight they must fall on the sbirri and secure freedom to thieves. Ah! there is a French soldier: that is more serious."
The soldier he saw was struggling along on the north side of the piazza, but the object of his pursuit had taken the other direction. That object was the eldest prisoner, who had wheeled round the Baptistery and was running towards the Duomo, determined to take refuge in that sanctuary rather than trust to his speed. But in mounting the steps, his foot received a shock; he was precipitated towards the group of signori, whose backs were turned to him, and was only able to recover his balance as he clutched one of them by the arm.
It was Tito Melema who felt that clutch. He turned his head, and saw the face of his adoptive father, Baldassarre Calvo, close to his own.
The two men looked at each other, silent as death: Baldassarre, with dark fierceness and a tightening grip of the soiled worn hands on the velvet-clad arm; Tito, with cheeks and lips all bloodless, fascinated by terror. It seemed a long while to them--it was but a moment.
The first sound Tito heard was the short laugh of Piero di Cosimo, who stood close by him and was the only person that could see his face.
"Ha, ha! I know what a ghost should be now."
"This is another escaped prisoner," said Lorenzo Tornabuoni. "Who is he, I wonder?"
"Some madman, surely," said Tito.
He hardly knew how the words had come to his lips: there are moments when our passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in one instant does the work of long premeditation.
The two men had not taken their eyes off each other, and it seemed to Tito, when he had spoken, that some magical poison had darted from Baldassarre's eyes, and that he felt it rushing through his veins. But the next instant the grasp on his arm had relaxed, and Baldassarre had disappeared within the church. (full text here)
I think Oxford is missing a bet in letting this one slip out of its catalogue. All is not lost, however. The
Penguin Classics edition is still available, as is the Broadview edition which, though it has two columns of tiny print and so is not kind to the weak-eyed among us, includes
Frederick Leighton's gorgeous illustrations:
9 comments:
Romola still fares better than Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, a novel I was reduced to teaching with a coursepack since both Oxford and Penguin have let it go out of print, though apparently there is an edition from Valancourt Books, I discovered recently. I agree with you about Romola, and think that Marius is extraordinary as well.
I've had the Penguin edition sitting on my shelf for a couple of months now but every time I consider reading it, I remind myself that "Middlemarch" is still staring at me. I might just commit literary sin and read "Romola" first...
Hmm. Well, interesting as Romola is, given a choice, I'd still start with Middlemarch. George Eliot herself said she began Romola as a young woman and ended it as an old one...
I see that Felix Holt is also no longer available in a pb world's classics edition (just in the hardcover Clarendon edition). Is this a trend, then? I suppose maintaining a great back catalogue is hard for every publisher, but I rather thought 'classics' were different.
Russell: maybe you should propose a Broadview edition of Marius.
I have thought of proposing an edition of Marius; the trouble is that you really have to be a fairly proficient Latinist to be able to take on that task. Pater used many classical sources, and there are Latin words, phrases, and quotations on almost every page. Which is no doubt one reason the book is not frequently taught, even though it is a classic of the Victorian faith and doubt discussion, as well as being a philosophical Bildungsroman and a text often discussed in recent work in gender studies.
When I taught it in a senior seminar, the students who wanted to do papers on it were both doing minors in classics.
I really liked Romola, and in Dr. Surridge's class we used the Broadview edition for the illustrations. However there is one missing, and one of the most visually interesting one as well, since it is a reprint of a volume edition and not the Cornhill serial publication.
In any case, I am writing my MA thesis on Romola and Leighton, and I am saddened to learn that they are stopping to print it.
My grandmother liked the novel so much that she named her daughter Romola.
I'm reading Romola now, the next-to-last bit of my personal survey of the novels of George Eliot (after this, Felix Holt).
For the first eighty pages I wasn't sure that I could do this. The travelogue stuff is bizarrely ponderous for such a witty writer as the author of Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill . . .
Just finished reading Romola. I absolutely love this book. What I find in it is, in the character of Savonarola and Romola's relation to him, a personification of the problem of religion. Where, how can the highest aspirations of human kind be expressed without being fatally corrupted by egotism? How should persons of ordinary virtue regard, value, support, and draw support and inspiration from those who would be saints, knowing that they are doomed to fail?
John, thank you for your comment, and your analysis, which I think is illuminating. I think I would even say the problem is broader than that of religion--that religion is the framework within which people historically have tried to answer the questions you raise, but (and perhaps I'm inferring this from GE's other work) it is not a necessary, and may be a corrupting, aspect of this quest. I'm looking forward to re-reading this novel for my winter term seminar; it has been a number of years since I went through it attentively.
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