Fold 'em (or, listening to your book)

As I mentioned before, it was made clear to me that there were not enough canonical authors in Book Two.  Needless to say, this was a problem on more than just the basic economic level (i.e., the publisher's desire to market my would-be opus): not only is this a book that is actually about a phenomenon visible only when you study non-canonical authors, but also part of the point was that canonical authors didn't go anywhere near the topic. The major novelists who occasionally tip-toed in its general direction...like, say, George Eliot in Romola...but didn't jump on the bandwagon otherwise, whether for political, theological, literary, and/or financial reasons.  In other words, here's an unbelievably widespread Victorian cultural phenomenon, but you won't know about it unless you read--or read about--a lot of authors who are now so far off the beaten path, they're practically lost in the shrubbery. 

Ergo: I decided that Romola would join Barnaby Rudge as the joint representatives of Books You Might Have Actually Heard Of. And so, I started working up the relevant context for Romola, which involved slogging through various mid-Victorian biographies of Savonarola and such.   Eleven pages ensued.  Whereupon I realized...

...that, in fact, on its own, Romola doesn't fit.  As Mom the Retired School Administrator joked, it's like a badly-planned addition that doesn't fit with the rest of the  house.  Sure, I can make a useful minor point about its relationship to the nineteenth-century cults (plural) of Savonarola, but otherwise, no.  However, guess where the book does make sense? In a chapter on the mid-century evangelical interest in the possibilities of a new Reformation in Italy--a bad, not to mention overoptimistic, interpretation of the Risorgimento and its significance--which sent them back to the failure of the Italian Reformation in the first place.  (My last post is immediately relevant here.)  Which, of course, brings us back to non-canonical novels.