SOURCE: "George Eliot in the 1860's," in Victorian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1961, pp. 93-108.

In the following excerpt, Allott argues that Eliot's fascination with Greek tragedy is reflected in her poem The Spanish Gypsy.

George Eliot's imagination … is from the first most at home in a region where the sense of tragic entanglement is acute and her "meliorism"—her philosophy of moral betterment—faces its stiffest challenge. By the mid-1860's she was sufficiently familiar with her own methods to recognise that the tragic mode was the one which came most naturally to her. "It is my way (rather too much so perhaps) to urge the human sanctities through tragedy," she wrote during the summer of 1866, when she was brooding over her unfinished tragic drama, The Spanish Gypsy. It was sometime during this period that she put together her "Notes on The Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General...