SOURCE: "A Brief Glance at George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer, 1983, pp. 184-90.

In the following excerpt, Marks argues that Eliot's novels and her poem The Spanish Gypsy explore similar themes and delineate similar characters.

In a footnote to their discussion of George Eliot, the authors of A Literary History of England observe that her long dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy "to which she devoted only too much labor and learning, has sunk out of sight under its own weight." Another modern critic called it "a long-winded narrative in pedestrian blank verse about the destiny of the gypsy race during the Moorish struggles in Spain, [which] now seems virtually unreadable." Yet The Spanish Gypsy appears less of an oddity when viewed in the context of George Eliot's total canon, particularly when we see its kinship to the themes, situations, and characters found in...