The Lifted Veil

by George Eliot

Overview

Latimer, a sensitive and intellectual man, finds he has clairvoyant powers: he has a vision of a woman, "pale, fatal-eyed", who he later meets: she is Bertha Grant, his brother's fiancee. Entranced and bewildered, Latimer is unwilling to take heed of the warning visions which beset him.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781776530496
Publisher:	The Floating Press
Publication date:	02/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	150 KB

About the Author

George Eliot was born Mary Anne Evans in Chilvers Coton, England in 1819 on an estate managed by her father. When her mother did she left school to run the household, continuing her education alone in the estate’s library. She was multi-lingual and steeped in classical literature by the time a series of her essays and translations led to an invitation to London to edit the prestigious Westminster Review—anonymously, for fear a female editor would put off readers. When nearly 40 she published the story collection Scenes of Clerical Life, under the pseudonym George Eliot, partly because she was living with a married man, radical publisher George Henry Lewes, and feared being shunned by the public. Bu tin 1849 her fist novel Adam Bede, with its startling realism and psychologically astute characterizations, caused a sensation—and prompted an imposter to claim authorship. Evans revealed herself and was indeed ostracized, although less so with each successful new book, from The Mill on the Floss to Silas Marner and Middlemarch. After 25 years together Lewes died and, still grieving, she married their banker, a man 20 years her junior. She died shortly thereafter in 1880.

Editorial Reviews

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
—Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer

"Small wonders."
—Time Out London

"[F]irst-rate…astutely selected and attractively packaged…indisputably great works."
—Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"I’ve always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it’s the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher’s fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
—The New Yorker

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—KQED (NPR San Francisco)

"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package."
—The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

[An] indisputably great work.”

New York Observer

Enormously intelligent.”

New York Times

George Eliot’s Gothic story…continues her preoccupation with human communication and sympathy through the figure of the telepathic narrator. Latimer, one of her least likeable characters, suffers tremendously under his heightened awareness of others’ petty and selfish thoughts. Latimer chooses to tell the story of his abilities as a tale of disability, a kind of pathography about his gift…The vehemence of his disgust for human frailties suggests that Latimer’s pain derives at least in part from his failure of empathy for others…Thus, his uncanny hearing unmasks a kind of sympathetic deafness to others, and his progressive heart disease indexes the shriveling of his capacity for human love and friendship.”

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