When Tito Melema meets Romola, the daughter of a blind scholar, he quickly makes it his goal to marry her. For her part, Romola is enchanted by Tito during their courtship, but soon after they marry, she discovers life with Tito is more difficult than she imagined. Set in fifteenth-century Florence, Romola is a delightful departure from English author George Eliot's typical depictions of nineteenth-century English society, and is notable for being Eliot's only work of historical fiction. Romola was Eliot's fourth novel and turned out to be one of her least commercially successful works. Despite this, many literary critics and historians have argued that Romola was Eliot's greatest novel.