This book investigates how the experiences of intellectually ambitious women in mid-Victorian England are reflected in two main novels by George Eliot - "The Mill on the Floss" (1860) and "Romola" (1862- 63) - to analyse the role that education and passions, duty and affections, played in the life of her heroines. It focuses on the unconventional ambitions of Maggie Tulliver and Romola De Bardi: both characterised by an insatiable thirst for knowledge and hunger for love, they find themselves entangled in the conflict between individual desire and moral responsibility; only Romola finally succeeds in her quest for individual fulfilment. The cooperation of the intellect and emotional impulses posited as irreconcilable in Maggie s industrial England, proves instead to be achievable in Renaissance Florence. Eventually, the shifting relation between passion and duty can resolve itself into a cooperation not only in that mythical and pre-industrial world untroubled by the constraining 19th-century bourgeois patriarchy that Renaissance Florence was, but also in Victorian England itself, as exemplified by Eliot s own experience as an outstanding, unconventional woman intellectual.
