George Eliot as “worthy scholar”: note taking and the composition of Romola

George Eliot found Romola challenging to write. She filled several notebooks with historical detail on Florentine life, including Italian writings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as those by later French, German and English authors. Extracting passages that interested her, she abridged, sometimes transcribing in Italian interspersed with English, and storing her notes under headings in her notebooks or “quarries” and she compiled lists, chronologies and indices as aides-memoires. These notebooks provide insights into Eliot’s compositional processes and show her addressing the challenge of incorporating a large amount of historical information into the text in imaginative and subtle ways. The Romola notebooks may support criticisms of the novel for an excess of erudition and scholarship, but they reveal little of the story of Eliot’s imaginative labor of composition.