Romola is a brilliant young woman who unknowingly falls in love with a handsome stranger whose true nature is fueled by greed, status and ego. Over the course of the novel, she uncovers his many transgressions and secret dealings. A handsome stranger called Tito Melema arrives in Florence and is immediately smitten by Romola—the daughter of a local scholar. The two eventually marry as Tito gains access to various social circles. He becomes an influential figure who’s eager to gain more status and approval. His selfish desires come at the detriment of his loved ones including Romola and his adoptive father. As Florence erupts into political warfare, Tito’s need for self-preservation comes at an unexpected cost. Romola is a period drama that was originally released from 1862-1863 as a fourteen-part series in Cornhill Magazine. The scope of Eliot’s storytelling incorporates critical historical events alongside a fictional family conflict. It’s a complex story that pushes the limits of compassion and understanding during a dire circumstance. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Romola is both modern and readable.

The eldest daughter of the Times Square “King of Porn,” Romola Hodas recounts her chaotic childhood amid the turmoil of publically growing up as the daughter of the man who almost single-handedly built New York City’s pornography and adult entertainment empire from the 1960s to the 1980s before his spectacular and public fall from grace. Behind the salacious headlines, Marty’s family paid a terrible price. In her shockingly honest, no-holds-barred memoir, Romola describes hanging out as a child in her father’s porn shops on 42nd Street and meeting the eclectic clientele who frequented the stores, making friends with the girls who performed live sex acts on stage, and spying on her parents’ sex orgies and crazy all-night swinger parties. Romola relates, in moving detail, how she cared for her three younger siblings when her brilliant, bipolar mother broke with reality, and how she survived verbal, physical, and emotional abuse; a year in reform school; her father’s three stints in prison; two kidnapping attempts by the mob (one while at summer fat camp); and how her baby brother, Jarrett, actually was briefly kidnapped by mobsters wanting to send Marty Hodas a clear, unambiguous message. For all its darkness, The Princess of 42nd Street is, at its heart, an uplifting and inspirational story of how one young woman overcame incredible odds to become a successful businesswoman who now devotes her life to helping others. Raw, unflinching, and devoid of self-pity, The Princess of 42nd Street is a one-of-a-kind story.

Set in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, this is the story of a girl's devotion to her blind father, her marriage to and betrayal by a young Greek and ultimate life of self-sacrifice.

Set in late fifteenth-century Italy, in the Renaissance Florence of Machiavelli and the Medicis, Romola (1862-3) is the most exotic and adventurous of George Eliot's novels. It charts the career and martyrdom of the charismatic religious leader Savonarola, who rebelled against the humanistspirit of the age and burned books on a "bonfire of vanities." With this story, Eliot brilliantly reconstructs in vivid detail a turning-point in the intellectual history of Europe. Eliot's own favorite among her novels, this edition's notes supply biographical information on the numerous historicalfigures in the novel, identify quotations and often difficult allusions, and give translations of all Italian words and phrases.