In 1842, George Henry Lewes suggested to Mary Ann Evans, companion and friend that they travel to Florence, Italy, in search of material for another novel. She agreed and spent the next five years researching the people, places, and issues that shaped that city during the Renaissance. By the time she had completed Romola, she was six years older and, in her mind, ‘an old woman’. When George Eliot chose fifteenth-century Florence as the setting for what she considered her most exceptional work, she linked her interest in the Renaissance—its aesthetic, political, and spiritual complexities—to her concern for Victorian feminist issues. Romola met with similar problems confronting women in England: property rights, female agency, freedom to divorce, child custody, and poor law concerns. By situating the plot within an account of the possession and sale of an ancient library collection initially owned by Romola’s father, Eliot prioritises books as the site of personal and political power. The interweaving of past and present, England with Italy, allows Eliot to brood over a fictional world that strangely resembles the world of her readers.