The Lifted Veil

I’ve had Middlemarch on my TBR for years but the prospect of starting this doorstopper was daunting (still is). A few weeks ago, I somehow discovered this novella and thought that it might be a good way to see if I like the author’s writing style before committing myself to a much harder task. In theory, the idea was good but I soon realised that this was a fantastic novella, the only of this kind she wrote. As such, my opinion of this particular work could not weight too much in my decision to read or not to read Middlemarch. <br /><br />The lifted Veil is, in my opinion, one of the better examples of a gothic tale. It is a bit tedious with its ever-present flashbacks but the mystery and the atmosphere is spooky enough. The narrator has a talent for premonitions, reading other’s thoughts and bad decisions, despite knowing the results. He hides his skill and pays for the omission. He marries a mysteries and mischievous woman who will torment his life. It offers a bleak version of marriage but I enjoyed reading the novella.

The story was a bit tedious starting with a flashback of a dying man on the days of his life. We hear about his education, his effeminate character, the brother, the successful father, his relationship to a close friend of his, Meunier. After his brother's death, mysterious Bertha is married to the protagonist of our story. She's a very mysterious and shady woman (liked the comparison to Cleopatra taken by the author). You always feel there is some mischief to come. But it takes endless pages until the tension sets in. The denouement is okay but nothing spectacular. The story itself is well written but a bit too slow for my liking. Recommended for all friends of a classic story though!

<b> <i>And she made me believe that she loved me. Without every quitting her tone of badinage and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I was near to her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It costs a woman so little effort to besot us in this way!</i> </b> <br /><br />George Eliot’s (born Mary Anne Evans) imagination cannot be faulted at all throughout this gem of a novella. It is a tour de force captured in a mere seventy-five pages.<br /><br />There’s something about nineteenth century novelists. There’s a crispness in their writing style in combination with the correctness of the language, in fact to the point of perfection, which isn’t so apparent in twentieth and twenty-first century authors.<br /><br />This book was published at the same time as <i>Adam Bede</i> but it has nevertheless been overlooked for a long time. It is also distinct from her other books in that she used a first-person narrator here.<br /><br />The need for Evans to resort to a pseudonym makes me wonder if she thought that her book would not be equally appreciated as she was a female writer in the Victorian age?<br /><br />The plot is indeed rather unusual and opens with Latimer, the narrator, realizing that the end of his life is approaching as he’s been having problems with angina; his physician does not believe either that his life will be protracted. Thus Latimer decides to tell the strange story of his own experiences.<br /><br />Deprived of a public school education, as it was a fact that he was too sensitive and shy to put up with the rough experience of a public school, the only avenue left open to him was to have private tutors. His father didn’t appear to be too fond of him and his preference was for the older boy, Alfred, his successor, who went to Eton and Oxford. <br /><br />But then Latimer’s life changed remarkably when he went to Geneva at the age of sixteen. However, he became ill there and his father decided to take him back to England. At this stage of his life our narrator was beginning to have visions and very odd things were happening to him. This was a gift that put him into a state of great excitement but before returning to England he met Bertha Grant and upon sight of her he fainted (I thought only women did that?]. Latimer then began to wonder if he had a mysterious disease.<br /><br />Bertha was to marry Alfred and our narrator then had a passion for this woman and the downward spiral began with a most unfortunate occurrence. He found that he could see into people’s souls, which showed him plainly that what people appeared to be on the outside were not that necessarily that way inside. Then he had foreseen an event that involved Bertha which proved to be true. For a young man who had never believed in evil, he had now reached the nadir of despair.<br /><br />The metaphysical and supernatural aspects of this novella are exquisitely described. Eliot’s mastery of suspense is maintained up until the penultimate page, when the secret was finally revealed.<br /><br /><i>And then the curse of insight – of my double consciousness, came again, and has never left me. I know all their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, their half-wearied pity.</i><br /><br />Something that I never knew, as was explained on the dust jacket about this series by Melville House was that:<br /><br /><i>Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nevertheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature’s greatest writers. In the Art of the Novella Series here, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.</i><br /><br />I’ll definitely read more of this author’s works.<br />

Quite an oddity for Eliot; a novella that can be read in one sitting and a first person narrator. It also has a distinct gothic edge and feels in the tradition of Mary Shelley and Poe. The themes are not so much supernatural as pseudo-scientific. It concerns the narrator Latimer who believes himself to have extra sensory powers; the ability to see the future and read the thoughts of others. There’s also a spot of mesmerism and the idea that a blood transfusion on death may temporarily raise someone from the dead (you can always practice this sort of thing on the family servants). <br />The narrator Latimer is certainly and unreliable narrator one feels. His seeming ability to forsee scenes and see thoughts start in his teenage years and is something he keeps quiet. He becomes fascinated by Bertha, his brother’s fiancée. He has a premonition of them marrying and being unhappy (to say more would invite spoilers). Latimer’s brother dies very suddenly, and indeed he marries Bertha.<br />What is consistent with Eliot’s other works is the importance of morality. If we were able to see into the hearts of others we would be horrified. The plot devices allow Eliot to explore a deep cynicism about human nature and it is rather gloomy. Latimer’s gifts are really a curse and there is a strong misanthropic element in his character. I think Eliot is playing with plot devices; Latimer has no choice but to be an omniscient narrator as the author gives him the ability to see the future and the thoughts of others. The title is interesting and the obvious conclusion is that it could be the veil between life and death or the veil between one consciousness and another; but this quote is illuminative as Latimer describes his vision of a Bridge in Prague, a city he has not yet visited;<br />“I could not believe that I had been asleep, for I remembered distinctly the gradual breaking in of the vision upon me, like the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinction of the landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the morning mist.”<br />Latimer had hoped his abilities would be the birth of a poetic sense, he was disappointed and he struggles to cope with his abilities. There is a deep narcissism in Latimer and there is no altruism. It is all about using the gift to find out what others think of him and seeing himself mirrored in others. It doesn’t occur to him to use the gift for the good of others. This may also be Eliot’s reflections on the Victorian Spiritualist phase which she had some interest in. It is also interesting to note that Latimer is described as weak and sickly and he is mostly reactive rather than proactive; Eliot places him in what would have been a traditionally female role in Victorian fiction.<br />All in all it is an oddity, but I enjoyed it and although the tale is rather bleak, I do think Eliot is having a little fun with the institution of marriage. It is worth looking out for and won’t take up much of your time.<br />

Two completely different works in this slim volume, a short short :<i> The Lifted Veil</i> (1859) (pp5-70) and a literary critical piece on women's fiction: <i>Silly Novels by Lady Novelists</i> (1856) (pp73-110) (guess what she thinks about them <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="ac95cd5f-e6fe-4a80-b09f-e909c83ca60a" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="ac95cd5f-e6fe-4a80-b09f-e909c83ca60a"> there is a clue in the title</label>) both together in one volume purely to get the book up to 110 pages in length, they share nothing in common.<br /><br />This book is one of the penguin Little black classics series, which despite being in and out of bookshops now and again with the express purpose of looking for books to buy, I have never noticed on sale to the public, the only other book in this series that I've read is Mary Shelley's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/29437563.Matilda" title="Matilda by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley" rel="noopener">Matilda</a> which by some curious circumstance is a little similar to <b> <i> The Lifted Veil</i> </b> in that both stories start with an unknown narrator promising to tell us the innocent reader the story of their life because they are approaching death. Both are also one trick stories: Shelley's story is her wondering what would happen if a father and daughter were reunited after many years of separation, and the father is obsessed with his daughter's deceased mother, and the daughter looks very much like her mother...<input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="b900ff3c-a95a-4cd7-ae6a-de300acef091" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="b900ff3c-a95a-4cd7-ae6a-de300acef091"> and if you are thinking 'incestuous longing' is what will happen you would not be wrong</label>, here Eliot wonders what would happen if a man had clairvoyant powers of a limited kind <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="4c855dad-473c-4600-b34d-45bdb0fdf600" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="4c855dad-473c-4600-b34d-45bdb0fdf600"> if you are thinking, 'well he'd have a lot of fun working as a police investigator, or professional poker player, or in the stock market' then you would be wrong. </label> I suppose inline with Eliot's novels, and she was a-working on <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/20564.The_Mill_on_the_Floss" title="The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot" rel="noopener">The Mill on the Floss</a> while writing this <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="e2a15883-7d5c-498c-af46-860e4dd0b9d5" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="e2a15883-7d5c-498c-af46-860e4dd0b9d5"> presumably for cash flow reasons</label> this is a study in character and the weak and feeble, ie typically feminine from a mid-Victorian point of view, character of the main figure determines the story (his wife in a bit of gender play is the thrusting and <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="8df06615-49dc-4564-a215-d6eded61c86d" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="8df06615-49dc-4564-a215-d6eded61c86d"> criminally</label> ambitious one, as he is overwhelmed by his visions of the future and apart from once feels unable to change or prevent events from happening. In passing he refers to himself as a ghost seer which struck me as unfamiliar in English but rung a bell - Schiller wrote a story called <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/31044457.Der_Geisterseher__Und_andere_Erz_hlungen" title="Der Geisterseher. Und andere Erzählungen by Friedrich Schiller" rel="noopener">Der Geisterseher</a> and since there is some play in the story around the writings of the German Romantics I wonder if Eliot's story borrows from, or picks up on a theme from, or develops an idea from the Schiller thriller, which naturally I have not read, but I have my suspicions, dark and sinister suspicions. <br /><br />Some nice turns of phrase particularly on the ability of rich people to afford more complex marital arrangements in those difficult times before modern divorce laws were introduced - Eliot herself, or rather the man in her life was rather inconvenienced by the absence of an equitable divorce law, and so never could be a public figure as a literary heavyweight in Victorian Britain.<br /><br /><b> <i>Silly Novels by Lady Novelists</i> </b> I felt very awkward about this one, it wasn't so much <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/388997.She_Stoops_to_Conquer" title="She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith" rel="noopener">She stoops to Conquer</a> as <i>she stomps to conquer</i> and she stamps for thirty odd pages over much trashy Victorian rubbish appealing to audiences as uncritical and highly segmented as we are familiar with today - ie young Methodist ladies who want to sigh over the love story in which the plain overlooked girl with a good heart gets to marry the young curate who may be ugly, but is unbending on questions of church discipline. I don't disagree with anything she says, but since I am mild mannered there is something uncomfortable about it - like watching a heavy-weight boxing champion go into a school and take on the pupils for five rounds each in the ring, laughing he knocks them down and out as the bell goes.

En esta <i>nouvelle</i> de estilo gótico, George Eliot nos presenta a Latimer, un hombre que desde muy joven ha sufrido malestares y enfermedad, además de comenzar a manifestarse en él una serie de visiones, que lo harán dudar entre lo que podría ser real y lo que no; a esto se suma la llegada de Bertha, quien le dará un significado diferente a su vida.<br /><br />De entrada, quedé muy sorprendido con esta historia corta (apenas 115 páginas) donde la autora logra desarrollar completamente una trama bien escrita y junto a ella a los dos personajes principales.<br /><br />Si bien la lectura se me hizo un poco pesada (mas no aburrida), fue necesario llevar un ritmo lento y pausado al ser un extenso monólogo de Latimer quien nos va narrando su historia, con arduos detalles y descripciones. Y por cierto, la forma de escribir de Eliot me impresionó demasiado, no tenía idea de que me encontraría con una atmósfera con toques de misterio, y con un protagonista más misterioso aún. El final sin duda, de lo mejor (que además ya se anticipa porque el libro ‘inicia’ con él).<br /><br /><i> <b>“Mientras el corazón late, hiérelo: es tu única oportunidad; mientras los ojos aún puedan volverse hacia ti con una tímida súplica en la que tiemblen las lágrimas, destrózalos con una mirada helada que niegue toda respuesta...”</b> </i>

This book won't be every reader's cup of tea. As the above description suggests, its subject matter was atypical for Eliot --though she wrote it in 1859, her publishers found it so different from her usual work that they delayed printing it until 1878. Premised as it is on psychic phenomena --flashes of telepathy and precognition, which in Eliot's day were just beginning to attract the attention of some intellectuals, and of the public (the titular "veil" is the one that hides the future)-- I would definitely classify it as science-fiction; but most genre buffs might not recognize it as that, because of the unfamiliar Victorian style and the lack of any attempt to advance an explicitly scientific explanation for the protagonist's abilities. But we're in the realm of "soft" sci-fi here; Eliot wasn't interested in "explaining" her premise, but rather in using it to explore certain thematic concerns. And while they're approached here from a (for her) fresh angle, those concerns turn out to be some of the same ones that are prominent in her better-known, more "respectable" descriptive fiction: the necessity, for human happiness, of healthy human relationships; and the question of whether we're the active architects of our own future or just hapless puppets of fate. (Her protagonist assumes the latter; the author's sympathies are with the former view, but she doesn't spell this out explicitly --the reader has to work to dig it out between the lines.)<br /><br />This is a dark, somber novel, unremittingly serious, concentrating on the inner life of the characters more than on outward events (though the latter are mentioned to illuminate the former). Written in the Romantic style, the emotions it seeks to evoke are fear and sorrow; and many modern readers will find the narrative pace somewhat slow, though the short length (67 pages --the 1985 Penguin edition has a helpful critical Afterward that adds about two dozen pages) partly compensates for this. (IMO, the stylistic influence of Poe can be detected here; and in turn, this work very probably influenced Henry James.) But if modern readers can get past these features, there <i>is</i> rewarding content here.

Una novelita o <i>nouvelle</i> que se puede leer de una sentada, y mi primer contacto con la autora victoriana George Eliot. La he leído en traducción española, de la que existen al menos dos versiones con ligera variación en el título. El texto original inglés se puede obtener de forma gratuita, en formato Epub o Kindle, en The Project Gutenberg.<br /><br />La obra se deja leer y, en algún momento, me ha recordado vagamente a una obra maestra posterior en tres décadas: <i>El retrato de Dorian Gray</i>. Quizás, lo que me sugería la novela de Wilde era el elemento sobrenatural, que en realidad es una excusa para la descripción psicológica de los protagonistas: el antihéroe masculino recibe el “don” traicionero de captar los pensamientos de cuantos lo rodean y de atisbar imágenes del futuro. Sin embargo, se embarca en un empeño de casarse con una mujer misteriosa a sabiendas de que la cosa acabará mal. En eso, hay también una referencia al Fausto de Goethe. Transcribo el pasaje de la versión inglesa que así lo sugiere, procedente del proyecto Gutenberg:<br /><br /><i>It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them for evermore.</i><br /><br />Lectura entretenida que, sin embargo, me ha dado la impresión de que iba perdiendo fuelle a medida que se aproximaba el final. Le doy tres estrellitas y media.

Is it the veil of reality that is lifting, or the notion of civility the moment two people lift the wedding veil of marriage in Victorian England? Is it superpowers or is it insanity? Either way, George Eliot spins a fascinating, if short, tale exploring these topics with <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/223222.The_Lifted_Veil" title="The Lifted Veil by George Eliot" rel="noopener">The Lifted Veil</a>.<br /><br />Perhaps an unusual introduction to Eliot’s work, I am still very impressed with her use of prose to convey uncertainty, and this novella is chock full of uncertainty. This story follows Latimer, an individual with the uncanny ability to see into the future, as well as into the thoughts of other people. He becomes fixated with, and perhaps even falls in love with, a woman named Bertha. Having such a firm grasp of other’s psyches and intentions, Bertha’s aloofness and emotional distance becomes an inescapable draw for him. What Latimer <i>can</i> see though, is his doom, and Bertha is somehow involved.<br /><br />The supernatural elements of clairvoyance are not really presented as the focus, so much as a vehicle for assessing what one may do with the knowledge of their inevitable demise. Destruction of a love, a marriage, and possibly even a life—here it is all presented as an inevitability. Yet the shear pull of desire’s force renders the narrator powerless to his intense and romantic fixation. While he cannot see everything, he can see that it will end horrifically. Yet the magnitude of the feeling overwhelms him.<br /><br /><i>“You have known the powerlessness of ideas before the might of impulse; and my visions, when once they had passed into memory, were mere ideas—pale shadows that beckoned in vain, while my hand was grasped by the living and the loved.”</i><br /> <br />Yet one must wonder, does Eliot imply that if the path to destruction is set in stone, you might as well enjoy it? Even if it hurts, even if it ruins, she seems to have a rather carpe diem approach to the allure of a femme fetal. <i>“While the heart beats, bruise it—it is your only opportunity.”</i> It is hard to discern if this is written in empathy for Latimer, or as a declarative statement for why people give into desire when all logic would be screaming otherwise.<br /><br />What I think is important to keep in mind though, is that our <i>protagonist</i> is at heart an unreliable narrator; his own family believes him to be a bit mad. Does he truly have powers of clairvoyance, or is his condition making him think that his anxieties are in fact manifesting into reality? Could he be hearing voices, or is he just hearing a projection of his fears and insecurities? I guess the answer to these questions lie in whether or not you believe the powers to be real or not. I myself am on the fence with this one.<br /><br />Though a bit short, this novella features some great prose, an interesting mystery, and for me was a solid introduction into George Eliot’s creativity as an author. I both recommend this book, and look forward to reading more of her stuff. <br /><br />Rating: <b>3.5 stars</b>

A supernatural novella tale of seeing into the future. A sickly man finds he can see into the future. His strong healthy brother dies leaving him available to marry his brothers fiancé. However, Bertha does not love him and instead despises him. Interesting reading about injecting live blood in dead people to reanimate them briefly back to life. This us done with his wives maid who tells him his wife plans to poison him. He separates from his wife and waits till he knows he us going to die. <br /><br />I found the story interesting but if you know the day you are going to die why not have a doctor present or someone. All a bit odd.