---

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.

---

I was born in Venice in 1990.After a period of studies at the Université de la Sorbonne-Paris IV,in 2015 I graduated with honours (MA) in Foreign Languages and Literatures(Università Ca´ Foscari Venezia),discussing a thesis which gives shape to this book today.Since 2015,I am working as a EFL Tutor at the Università Alma Mater Studiorum in Bologna.

---