I am stunned by "Romola"

"Romola" ****
by George Eliot

Eliot remains my favorite Victorian novelist. "Romola" was the last of her "big" novels that I had not read, and the first two thirds of the book is a slog-a-thon that poses considerable frustrations. However, the end third is one stunning revelation after another, and it's easy to see why Eliot loved it more than anything else she had written.

The first frustration is that "Romola" is a historical novel set in Italy at the time of the Borgia popes, and all the characters talk like they do in "Ivanhoe." It takes a good quarter of the novel to get used to these long speeches and archaic constructions, especially since "Romola" is not the page-turner that "Ivanhoe" is.

The second frustration is with the title character herself, the daughter of a blind scholar (echoes of Milton browbeating his daughters come to mind) who does everything her father, husband, and, later, the reformer Savanarola, tell her to do.

The third frustration is the fact that it's very difficult for the reader to see where the various subplots of this book are going until the very end. It's a little like looking at a pixelated photo close-up; you don't really see how the personal stories of the characters mesh with the historical backdrop until the very end.

Romola's story is the struggle of a soul to live a virtuous and independent life ... a life that she has chosen through her own free will. This turning point takes place quite late in the book after Romola's father has died, her husband has proved unfaithful and faithless, and Savanarola, her mentor of sorts, is being tried for heresy. Romola contemplates her attempts to honor her own marriage vows, even if her husband, Tito, will not honor his, and here comes the pivot point of the book:

All her efforts at union had only made its impossibility more palpable, and the relation had become for her simply a degrading servitude. The law was sacred. Yes, but rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind that the problem before her was essentially the same as that which had lain before Savanarola--the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended, and where the sacredness of rebellion began.

***SPOILERS FOLLOW*** At this point, the novel begins to swiftly braid the strands of the novel together, and Romola, whose adversities have sharpened her sense of moral duty and willing charity, is left a widow. Free, in other words. She discovers that her husband has left a mistress and children who will otherwise be left to the vagaries of Florence's chaotic civil and religious situation. And so she devises a way to take them in and give them a loving home with her, without their ever knowing of her relation to Tito. And she becomes a patron to the poor of Florence generally.

It is hard not to see something autobiographical here. Eliot's "marriage" to Henry Lewes was never legally sanctioned. Lewes and his wife were unable to divorce, even though Mrs. Lewes had several children by another man. In arranging their relationship, which I think she would have considered a "sacred rebellion," Eliot ensured that Mrs. Lewes and all her children were cared for. She was an affectionate friend to Lewes' older sons, whom she sent to school in Germany and who called her "Mutti."

"Romola" examines Eliot's own moral and religious views. Certainly, it leaves room for the unconventional within the moral. It makes distinctions between law, religion, and morality. It reflects Eliot's own lively interest in religious questions.

And perhaps it sheds light on Eliot's story of St. Teresa of Avila, which makes a very odd preface to her other great work, "Middlemarch." The preface notes that St. Teresa 

soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

It is not the women in "Middlemarch" whom Eliot allows their "epos," but Romola, who has found her "life beyond self." That this was Eliot's aim for her own life "Romola" makes indisputable.