Abstract
This essay studies George Eliot’s long poem The Spanish Gypsy, and her shorter verse works ‘The Legend of Jubal’ and ‘Brother and Sister’, in order to show that her poetic writing presents two divergent accounts of psychology, founded on two contrasting conceptions of memory. On the one hand, George Eliot’s verse resists the analytical stance of Victorian psychological theory and of her own novels, championing a metaphysical account of psychology in which memory, as an activity of the immortal soul, guarantees the permanence of personal identity by connecting the present self to that of the past. On the other hand, her poetry also articulates a concern that the act of remembering exposes the mutability of the mind by highlighting the unbridgeable gap between past and present. This latter conception of memory was shared by the Victorian psychologists, including Herbert Spencer and George Eliot’s partner G.H. Lewes, who defined the mind as a process rather than as a fixed entity. The representation of memory in George Eliot’s verse is informed by the theories of these psychologists in ways that are obscured but not effaced by the lyrical register and metaphysical terminology of her poems.