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A review by gh7
Romola by George Eliot
4.0
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 question Eliot had a lot of fun writing this. I was reminded at times of Woolf's Orlando. Except Virginia makes such a warm breezy current of her feeling for and knowledge of Elizabethan England whereas Eliot's loving evocation of 16th century Florence is much stodgier. It's as if she couldn't resist using every single detail of her research which might at times have been impressive but it also dragged at the narrative with lead weights. The first hundred pages where there's little indication of a plot often bored me. Once the story gets going it does improve hugely.
Throughout the novel my feeling was her knowledge of Florence was largely acquired through books and paintings. I rarely had a sense of her having touched the doors and walls she was describing. Forster's Florence, for example, is much more vibrantly alive.
Another thing, Eliot is always so good at evoking her characters through their speech idiosyncrasies and rhythms. Here, because, she's dealing with a foreign language this is far from the case. The dialogue is often laboured and over-elaborate and homogenous. No one has a distinctive voice.
It's no doubt an indication of Eliot's own puritanical leanings that she created such an affectionate portrait of Savonarola. Personally I have little sympathy for anyone who high-handedly destroys works of art or gets up on pulpits telling the populace how they should live, which, essentially, is his legacy.
3.5 stars (now and again there's some fabulous writing).
There's no question Eliot had a lot of fun writing this. I was reminded at times of Woolf's Orlando. Except Virginia makes such a warm breezy current of her feeling for and knowledge of Elizabethan England whereas Eliot's loving evocation of 16th century Florence is much stodgier. It's as if she couldn't resist using every single detail of her research which might at times have been impressive but it also dragged at the narrative with lead weights. The first hundred pages where there's little indication of a plot often bored me. Once the story gets going it does improve hugely.
Throughout the novel my feeling was her knowledge of Florence was largely acquired through books and paintings. I rarely had a sense of her having touched the doors and walls she was describing. Forster's Florence, for example, is much more vibrantly alive.
Another thing, Eliot is always so good at evoking her characters through their speech idiosyncrasies and rhythms. Here, because, she's dealing with a foreign language this is far from the case. The dialogue is often laboured and over-elaborate and homogenous. No one has a distinctive voice.
It's no doubt an indication of Eliot's own puritanical leanings that she created such an affectionate portrait of Savonarola. Personally I have little sympathy for anyone who high-handedly destroys works of art or gets up on pulpits telling the populace how they should live, which, essentially, is his legacy.
3.5 stars (now and again there's some fabulous writing).