The Lifted Veil

Apparently this novel was not only unusual for George Elliot, but for the time. The author presents Latimer - a young man from a wealthy self-made family who is not raised to carry on the family business - that is left to his stronger and lustier older brother. Whilst in Switzerland studying in a healthy atmosphere where he is thriving, he has a clairvoyant moment that leads to a dead faint. As the blurb from the book states: Latimer, a sensitive and intellectual man, finds he has clairvoyant powers. Then he has a vision of a woman, 'pale, fatal-eyed', whom he later meets: she in Bertha Grant, his brother's fiancee. Entranced, bewildered, Latimer falls under her spell, unwilling to take heed of the warning visions which beset him. In this edition, there is an excellent essay on George Elliot and this novella's publication history. At the time of writing, the concept of being able to change your fate was little considered - fate was fate and the fact that you could see into your future or that of others was unfortunate but unchangeable. It is only is later years that the concept of changing your fate has been presented although not all novels and other media such as plays and movies allow us to get off so easily, as there is a common theme of running away from the known fate, only to reach it in another quite different manner. The Twilight Zone made much of this theme in its shows - so too Alfred Hitchcock's TV Theater plays.

A novella about a troubled young man, the son and heir to a wealthy banker (or some such). A great exercise if you want to think about "the reliability of the narrator," because he's clearly mad as a hatter but doesn't know it; but it's mercifully short. George Eliot's writing is superb as usual, though the story is very odd and gets especially weird towards the end.

A mini-book containing a short story about a man whose life is blighted by his ability to foresee the future and read other people's thoughts.

[The Lifted Veil] is a rather anamolous novella by George Eliot as it deals with the supernatural and seems to be Eliot's foray into Gothic experimentation.Latimer, the protagonist, is a rather neurasthenic young man who becomes obsessed with Bertha Grant, his robust brother's fiancee. After his brother dies in an accident, he marries Bertha although he has a premonitory vision of their miserable life together.I found the narrator somewhat intriguing, but I don't think the other characters were at all well developed. Eliot built the suspense well, but I thought the payoff was pretty anti-climactic. Up until that point, I thought the book was very Poe-like, but Poe usually manages to "thrill" the reader in a more satisfying way. Her exploration was more philosophical than Gothic -- more interested in the horrors of a life lived outside of meaningful social contacts than creating terror or horror in her readers.

Gorgeous short story. Really beautifully written, and an intense read.

More of a short story than a novel (at only 60+ pages plus an afterwards by a modern writer), this was a fast, enjoyable read. Eliot's style and tone here reminded me of Frankenstein and a number of Poe's short stories.