In the following essay, Ashby interprets "The Lifted Veil" in light of the "transcendent ego" standard of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine as well as the magazine's treatment of such character types as the spasmodic poet and the uncertain scientist.

How may "The Lifted Veil" throw light on the subject of regionalism and George Eliot? As Barbara Hardy has pointed out, the tale is, in part, about the intersection of the homely and the exotic. Half the action takes place during a fateful two months in Europe, half in the shires. In this case, however, the play between local and cosmopolitan experience is not one between embedded and enlarged sympathies. Latimer's imaginative "gifts" originate on the continent, but withdrawal and isolation are their result.

In fact, "The Lifted Veil" takes as its subject the marginal role played by centrifugal humanistic pursuits. In Latimer's discourse, traditionally central relationships are the...