Having carefully studied the life and surroundings of Savonarola, she now took up this subject, and embodied it in her Romola.  This novel appeared in the Cornhill Magazine from July, 1862, to July, 1863.  It has been reported that it was offered to Blackwood for publication, who rejected it because it was not likely to be popular with the public.  The probable reason of its publication in the Cornhill Magazine was that a large sum was paid for its first appearance in that periodical.  In a letter written July 5, 1862, Lewes gave the true explanation.  “My main object in persuading her to consent to serial publication was not the unheard-of magnificence of the offer, but the advantage to such a work of being read slowly and deliberately, instead of being galloped through in three volumes.  I think it quite unique, and so will the public when it gets over the first feeling of surprise and disappointment at the book not being English and like its predecessor.”  The success it met with while under way in the pages of the magazine may be seen from a letter written by Lewes on December 18.  “Marian lives entirely in the fifteenth century, and is much cheered every now and then by hearing indirectly how her book is appreciated by the higher class of minds, and some of the highest, though it is not, and cannot be, popular.  In Florence we hear they are wild with delight and surprise at such a work being executed by a foreigner, as if an Italian had ever done anything of the kind.” Romola was illustrated in the Cornhill Magazine, and on its completion was reprinted by Smith, Elder & Co., the publishers of that periodical.

The success of Romola was such as to lead George Eliot to begin on another historical subject, though she was probably induced to do this much more by its fitness to her purposes than by the public reception of the novel.  This time she gave her work a poetical and dramatic form. The Spanish Gypsy was written in the winter of 1864-5, but was laid aside for more thorough study of the subject and for careful revision.  She had previously, in 1863, written a short story in verse, founded on the pages of Bocaccio, entitled “How Lisa Loved the King.”  Probably other poems had also been written, but poetry had not occupied much of her attention.  As a school-girl, and even after she had gone to London, she had written verses.  Among these earlier attempts, it may not be unsafe to conjecture, may have been the undated poems which she has published in connection with The Legend of Jubal.  These are “Self and Life,” “Sweet Evenings come and go, Love,” and “The Death of Moses.”