Romola's "stifling crowded life": Urban Claustrophobia in George Eliot and Frederic Leighton's Cornhill Collaboration

This article examines George Eliot and Frederic Leighton's collaboration on Romola(1862–63) for the Cornhill Magazine, arguing that their serialized text allows a reading that scholars of the unillustrated novel have overlooked. It considers how Leighton's chapter initials, whichrepeatedly depictcity walls and dwarfed figures, complement Eliot's emphasis on Florence's stifling environment and convey the diminished agency of the novel's central characters. The interleaving of text and image primes readers to notice references to architecture in both Eliot's narrative and Leighton's illustrations and to read them as underscoring Romola's sense of the city as claustrophobic and repressive.