Romola is a historical novel written between 1862 and 1863 by English author Mary Ann Evans under the pen name of George Eliot set in the fifteenth century.

It is "a deep study of life in the city of Florence from an intellectual, artistic, religious, and social point of view".

[1] The story takes place amidst actual historical events during the Italian Renaissance, and includes in its plot several notable figures from Florentine history.

In this setting, a Florentine trader meets a shipwrecked stranger, who introduces himself as Tito Melema, a young Italianate-Greek scholar.

Tito learns from Fra Luca, a Dominican friar, that his adoptive father has been forced into slavery and is asking for assistance.

Tito introspects, comparing filial duty to his new ambitions in Florence, and decides that it would be futile to attempt to rescue his adoptive father.

Ignorant of Romola's plans, Fra Luca warns her of a vision foretelling a marriage between her and a mysterious stranger who will bring pain to her and her father.

Girolamo Savonarola preaches to Florentines about ridding the Church and the city of scourge and corruption, and drums up support for the new republican government.

Panicked and somewhat ashamed of his earlier inaction, Tito denies knowing the escaped prisoner and calls him a madman.

She secretly leaves Tito and Florence, but is persuaded by Savonarola to return to fulfil her obligations to her marriage and her fellow Florentines.

Mirroring this, he has escaped attempts by Baldassarre to both kill and expose him, and maintains a secret marriage to Tessa, with whom he has fathered two children.

Five supporters of the Medici family are sentenced to death, including Romola's godfather, Bernardo del Nero.

Renaissance Florence was therefore a convenient setting for a historical novel that allowed exotic characters and events to be examined in Victorian fashion.

Felicia Bonaparte speculated about the title character as a "thoroughly contemporary figure, the Victorian intellectual struggling to resolve the dilemmas of the modern age".

Richard Hutton, writing in The Spectator, in 1863, observed that "[t]he greatest artistic purpose of the story is to trace out the conflict between liberal culture and the more passionate form of the Christian faith in that strange era, which has so many points of resemblance with the present".

Yet continued immersion in religious life highlights its incompatibility with her own virtues, and by the end of the story she has adopted a humanist, empathic middle ground.

[4] George Eliot herself described her labour in writing the novel as one about which she could "swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent care for veracity of which my nature is capable".

Anthony Trollope, having read the first instalment of Romola, expressed wonder at the toil Eliot must have "endured in getting up the work", but also cautioned her against excessive erudition, urging her not to "fire too much over the heads of her readers".