The Lifted Veil’s sickly narrator, Latimer, believes himself to be cursed with the ability to see the future and sense the thoughts and feelings of those around him. Disgusted by what he sees in the minds of others, he accepts that he will lead an unobtrusive life, constantly overshadowed by his more vigorous elder brother. That is, until he meets and becomes fascinated with Bertha, his brother’s beautiful and coquettish fiancée.

The Lifted Veil sits alongside works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a definitive piece of Victorian-era horror fiction, and was a departure for author George Eliot who generally focused on realism in her writing. Nonetheless, through The Lifted Veil Eliot proves skilled at incorporating the mysterious themes of the horror fiction genre into her distinctive writing style.

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