Today’s Countdown to Hallowe’en review from Randy is a short yet effective novella from another author better known for her non-genre fiction.
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Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers beyond the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.
(Motto Eliot placed at the beginning of the story.)
Latimer is a lonely, disenchanted man, living in his father’s home, knowing his father considers his brother the appointed heir to the family fortune. Truthfully, Latimer is dreamy, absorbed in his reading, mainly poetry, aware that no one expects very much from him, yet wondering if and when inspiration will strike and he will become a creator.
And then Bertha arrives in his life. His first precognitive vision presents him with a young woman he’s never met. Moments after having the vision, he is introduced to Bertha, the woman and his brother’s fiancé. This gives Latimer reason to hope, to hope desperately, and to despair.
George Eliot (real name, Marian Evans) was a major 19th century English writer known for her realistic fiction, like Middlemarch and The Mill and the Floss and this novella is an anomaly in her works since it deals with clairvoyance and mind-reading. Well-written, at times it reads a bit like Poe and while I wouldn’t say it was of the caliber of Frankenstein or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in effectiveness, it would sit comfortably on the same shelf with them since it, too, is less about scaring the reader than about a dark moral contemplation of the complexities in its given premise. What would it mean for Latimer to gain his love? And what if his precognitive powers already suggest how it would end? Does he hope any the less? Does he act or not?
This edition includes an afterward by Beryl Gray (about whom I have been unable to find any information) that notes The Lifted Veil was written during the writing of The Mill and the Floss and depicts a character who is the antithesis of Maggie in that novel. I haven’t read the latter, but it’s not hard to imagine an author in the act of writing a major work finding another outlet for recording her tussle with a theme that whole-heartedly captures her imagination.
Further, it suggests anyone familiar with that novel might well find this novella worth reading, as it would be for anyone who likes dark fiction on the literary side. I would suggest pairing it with another short novel, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, since I expect that Wharton’s Frome and Eliot’s Latimer, temperamental opposites, and the ways their fates compare and contrast would be intriguing.
THE LIFTED VEIL by George Eliot
Edition reviewed: Penguin Books/Virago Press, 1985
ISBN: 9780140161168
91 pages
Review by Randy Money
