Reading notes: 'Romola'

By George Eliot. It's absolutely wonderful; for me, somewhere between Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss. From what I can gather, Romola tends to be considered (when it's thought of at all) only as a curiosity ("hey, George Eliot wrote a novel about 1490s Florence"). This is first-rate Victorian novel, though: meaningful ethical inquiry, rich satisfying plot, courtship, and all that. Reading this took a lot more effort than reading other books, in part because I don't know very much about 1490s Florence,1 and in part because it's pretty long (560ish medium-sized pages in the edition I read). There are plenty of characters, some of their names are similar, small plot details matter a lot, and Eliot assumes a fair amount of background knowledge. Moreover, she's such a precise writer that it's worth lingering over sentences and paragraphs. This is the most successful philosophical novel I've ever read, for some hard-to-define notion of "philosophical novel." It addresses, directly and…