SOURCE: "The Lifted Veil,' Romola and The Spanish Gypsy" in George Eliot and Judaism, Universität Salzburg, 1975, pp. 81-116.

In the following excerpt, Baker considers the sources of Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy.

Romola… provides evidence of the development of George Eliot's Jewish interests and knowledge of history, and her increasing readiness by comparison with "The Lifted Veil" to put them to fictional use. Her dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy on which she began work in 1864, … a year after finishing her Italian novel, shows these developments at a further stage, and, in addition, provides further evidence of a thorough pre-occupation with values and desires which are to find their fictional fruition in Daniel Deronda. An examination of the sources of the poem helps in an assessment of George Eliot's Jewish knowledge after 1864, illuminates it, and provides background material for a discussion of her last novel.

The philosophical and...