SOURCE: Payne, Susan. “George Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil’: A Game of Hide and Seek.” In The Strange within the Real: The Function of Fantasy in Austen, Brontë, and Eliot, pp. 123-67. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1992.

In the following essay, Payne provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of “The Lifted Veil” and discusses the reaction to the story from her publisher, critics, and readers.

1. the Genesis of “the Lifted Veil”

To link the name of George Eliot, who was as uncompromisingly and unselfconsciously sérieuse as we like to think only a Victorian intellectual could be, with the concept of play, seems, at the very least, paradoxical. And yet Eliot herself, when she first mentions “The Lifted Veil” in a letter dated March 1st, 1859, specifically uses the term jeu, telling Blackwood, her publisher:

I have a slight story of an outré kind—not a jeu d'esprit but a jeu de...