Romola and Milton: A Cultural History of Rewriting

Abstract

George Eliot's novel of fifteenth-century Florence, Romola, represents her struggles with both the history of Western culture and her real and literary fathers by reimagining Milton's life and thought. As heir to both Renaissance humanism and Reformation zeal, as a central historical link between fifteenth-century Florence and Victorian England, as the patriarch of English letters, and as the father of rebellious daughters, Milton is the unacknowledged father in Romola, and the stories of his family are woven into the fabric of the novel. Recovering the cultural history of these stories-retold by biographers for two centuries and fictionalized throughout the nineteenth century-allows us to historicize and expand Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's insight that Milton is present in Romola, but also to confute their widely accepted conclusion (quoting Harold Bloom) that Milton was for Eliot, as for other women writers, "the great Inhibitor, the Sphinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradles."