Taking Fidelity Philosophically: Romola and the Historical Novel as Translation

Abstract: For many notable practitioners of the historical novel, writing in the genre means first and foremost engaging in a literary activity of a different kind: translation. Yet it remains a critical curiosity that in spite of their shared preoccupation with representational fidelity, literary translation and the historical novel have rarely been read in relation to each other, even in cases when the latter depends upon the former. This essay establishes a representational and epistemological common ground between these two literary modalities by reading closely George Eliot's 1863 historical fiction Romola , which grapples with the task of historical and linguistic fidelity primarily through the means of translation.