Romola

A young Greek is washed ashore near Florence with jewels sewn into his tunic and a face that nobody can quite bring themselves to distrust. Those jewels would ransom the adoptive father who raised him and who is still chained somewhere in the East, and the whole novel grows out of the soft, reasonable arguments by which he persuades himself to keep them. George Eliot said she began Romola a young woman and finished it an old one, and the cost of it is in every street: the barber's shop, the black silk lucco, a young Machiavelli watching from a corner while the republic argues itself toward burning its own beautiful things in the piazza. Against all of that stands a blind scholar's daughter, raised on Greek and on loyalty, left to work out alone what she owes a husband who has become a stranger and a prophet whose visions have begun to serve his party. No other Eliot novel reaches for anything this large.