The article sets out to establish the ways in which the Romanian novelistic production between 1845 and 1947 reflects the challenges and accomplishments of successive efforts at modernising the educational system. Therefore, the case-studies we discuss are focused on some of the major implications of Romanian education: the shifts in the literal spaces in which the educational process is being conducted, the access to books and the social prestige accrued through reading, the link between education and the abroad – including the ambivalent status of foreign language education as platform on which the conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is played out –, the opportunities opened by scientific progress, but also the anxieties it generates.