THE LIFTED VEIL
by George Eliot, 1859

George Eliot was well known as a rationalist and agnostic. Her story "The Lifted Veil," initially rejected by her publisher, John Blackwood, appears at first sight uncharacteristic. It combines a gothic story of second sight with science fiction, a transfusion of blood into the veins of a corpse immediately after death. The title comes from Shelley's "Sonnet": "Lift not the painted veil which those who live/Call Life." The poet warns that "behind, lurk Fear/and Hope … I knew one who had lifted it … he sought,/For his lost heart was tender, things to love,/But found them not, alas."

This is the plight of Latimer, the story's narrator. He is unloved by his elderly father and scorned by his athletic brute of an elder brother. Latimer is sickly but with the ambiguous gift of telepathy. He carries the burden of the thoughts, often vulgar and trivial, of those around him, but for self-protection he conceals this talent. We learn at the beginning that Latimer also has second sight. He foresees his own approaching death when "no one will answer by bell." Latimer is educated, not at Eton and Oxford like his brother, but at Geneva, where young George Eliot, similarly deprived of formal education, reinvented herself by first starting to write her journal. There he makes a friend, Meunier (a name taken from a celebrated preacher Eliot heard in Geneva). This story, apart from Impressions of Theophrastus Such, is her only first-person narrative.

The story is about the pain and the danger of the power to "see" more than other people. Latimer is a poet manqué. He has "the poet's sensibility without the voice," a fear Eliot may have been painfully overcoming for herself at the time of writing, when she had already published Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede. The loss of visionary power was an anxiety that remained with her, as is shown by the poem "Armgart" and the fate of Alcharisi in Daniel Deronda (1876); both singers, Armgart and Alcharisi, end up singing out of tune. Latimer's brother Alfred is engaged to the enchanting but cold and scheming Bertha, whom Latimer is also fascinated by.

The name Bertha resonates as that of the destructive dark madwoman in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847). The destructive blond beauty looks forward to Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch (1872) and to Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda. Latimer has a prevision of Bertha as his wife, hating him and secretly wishing that he would kill himself: "I saw the great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond eyes. I shuddered—I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean thoughts, but I felt helpless before her."

Before going to Prague, Latimer has had a grim vision of the city as like something out of Dante: "The blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of the place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day." He imagines these stone bodies as "wor-shipping in the stifling air of the churches." When he reaches Prague, it is as he has imagined it.

F. C. Pinion believes that this is "the heart of the story." In it "lies the more generalised fear of an era when the old, otherworldly religion is dead, and people, without a new religion, pursue their activities mechanically, with no high purpose." He also suggests that "her feelings of rejection by kindred and friends are implicit in the hero's bitterness; and her own religion, as opposed to … other-worldly religion … is heard in the brief overtone of 'I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known.'… It is noticeable that, the more spiritually deadened Latimer becomes through being cut off from his fellow-men, the more subject he is to visions like that of Prague."

Latimer visits a synagogue. Using almost the same words from her own journal, Eliot has Latimer say, "I felt a shuddering impression that this strange building, with its shrunken lights, was of a piece with my vision. Those darkened dusty Christian saints, with their loftier arches and their larger candles, needed the consolatory scorn with which they might point to a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own."

The elder brother is killed in a riding accident, and Latimer inherits the estate. He marries Bertha, who persuades him that she loves him. Her thoughts, alone among those of his acquaintances, remain impenetrable to him. She is cold and distant. When a servant dies, Meunier carries out an experiment in blood transfusion that briefly revivifies the corpse. The dead woman reveals that she has bought poison at Bertha's instigation: "You mean to poison your husband." After this Bertha and Latimer separate, and Latimer, knowing that he is to die that day—20 September 1850—struggles to write his story. He associates Bertha with water nixies, malignant water spirits in Germanic legend, and with Lucrezia Borgia, seen in a picture attributed to Giorgione.

In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar give a 20-page analysis of the story. They identify Bertha with Milton's Eve in association with Satan, pointing to her "great rich coils" of hair and the serpent brooch "like a familiar demon on her breast." They also associate Latimer, in his vulnerability and isolation, with the monster created by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Bertha also carries reminiscences of John Keats's poem "Lamia," about a sorceress-serpent who is implicitly compared to Nereids, water spirits, and who glitters in "sapphires, greens and amethyst/And rubious argent." Falling in love with a young man, she manages to change her outward form to that of a beautiful woman and marries him, but after the marriage she reverts to her true form as a deadly snake.

—Valerie Grosvenor Myer