Thus wrote George Eliot about Romola, the book which is central in her career as a novelist and among her most colorful, fluent and persuasive works. In it she recreates the upheavals of fifteenth-century Florence: the time of the expulsion of the Medici, the invasion by Charles VIII of France and the ascendancy and fall of Savonarola. Living in the city-state at this time is the noble and courageous Romola, who finds herself increasingly disillusioned by Savonarola's career and repelled by her unscrupulous and self-indulgent husband, Tito Melema.