SOURCE: '"Where No Man Praised': The Retreat from Fame in George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 55-74.

In the following-essay, Krasner explores the personal costs of "exposure" as defined in George Eliot's poetry.

As she was completing her long dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy, George Eliot responded to an inquiring publisher by drawing attention to the difference between this work and her novels:

The book I am writing is not a novel, and is likely to be dead against the taste of that large public which a publisher is for the most part obliged (rather unhappily) to take into account [The George Eliot Letters, 1955].

While it seems rather self-defeating for an author to warn a publisher that her new work will never sell, it is typical of George Eliot's attempt, at this point in her career, to distance herself from the...