Romola

In Florence in the 1490s, after the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, the noble, serious Romola, daughter of a blind old scholar, marries Tito Melema, a charming, clever young Greek who has arrived in the city after a shipwreck. But Tito is selfish and cowardly: he has abandoned the adoptive father who raised him, now a captive, and betrays everyone who trusts him as he rises in the dangerous politics of the city, while the fiery Dominican friar Savonarola preaches against the vanities of Florence.

George Eliot spent years researching Renaissance Florence for the novel, published in 1862 and 1863, and said that she began it a young woman and finished it an old one. It is a rich historical portrait and a study of moral corruption. Read Middlemarch and Adam Bede.