![]() ![]() The story is about the pain and the danger of the power to "see" more than other people. This story, apart from Impressions of Theophrastus Such, is her only first-person narrative. There he makes a friend, Meunier (a name taken from a celebrated preacher Eliot heard in Geneva). 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. We learn at the beginning that Latimer also has second sight. He carries the burden of the thoughts, often vulgar and trivial, of those around him, but for self-protection he conceals this talent. ![]() Latimer is sickly but with the ambiguous gift of telepathy. He is unloved by his elderly father and scorned by his athletic brute of an elder brother. ![]() This is the plight of Latimer, the story's narrator. 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." It combines a gothic story of second sight with science fiction, a transfusion of blood into the veins of a corpse immediately after death. ![]() Her story "The Lifted Veil," initially rejected by her publisher, John Blackwood, appears at first sight uncharacteristic. George Eliot was well known as a rationalist and agnostic. ![]()
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