Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kate Flint

Critical Essay by Kate Flint

SOURCE: Flint, Kate. “Blood, Bodies, and ‘The Lifted Veil.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 4 (March 1997): 455-73.

In the following essay, Flint examines “The Lifted Veil” in respect to Victorian views on medicine, science, and psychology.

On 17 March 1878 Edith Simcox paid a visit to George Eliot and her companion, George Lewes. Simcox recorded their conversation in her Autobiography: “I asked about the Lifted Veil. Lewes … asked what I thought of it. I was embarrassed and said—as he did—that it was not at all like her other writings, wherefrom she differed; she said it was ‘schauderhaft’ [horrible, ghastly] was it, and I [said] yes; but I was put out by things that I didn't quite know what to do with.”¹ “The Lifted Veil,” written in the early months of 1859 and first published in Blackwood's Magazine in June of that year, has long been a work that critics...
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