Romola by George Eliot
Published 1863 · 576 pages · 250,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Romola to read?
Romola scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Renaissance Italian terms, classical references, theological vocabulary, and Eliot's most elaborately researched prose.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Dense, scholarly Victorian prose with long sentences, historical exposition, and philosophical analysis.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Political philosophy, theology, and moral psychology are explored at a higher level of abstraction than Eliot's English novels.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Extraordinary density of historical detail: Florentine politics, Renaissance culture, Savonarola's movement, and classical scholarship.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Omniscient narrator with essayistic commentary. The historical distance creates its own form of indirection.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- Florence, the classical texts, the religious conflict, and Tito's disguises carry symbolic weight within the historical framework.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Less ironic than Eliot's English novels. The treatment of Tito combines psychological analysis with moral gravity.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- Tito is destroyed, Romola survives to raise his children by another woman. Resolution is complete but morally complex.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Historical panorama with personal drama, political intrigue, and religious crisis interwoven across several years.
How Romola is regarded
Romola holds a literary regard score of 60 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.