SOURCE: “Blood, Bodies, and The Lifted Veil,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 51, No. 4, March, 1997, pp. 455-73.

In the following essay, Flint examines George Eliot's The Lifted Veil as a text representative of the developing contemporary debate about the relationship between physiology 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...