The Lifted Veil, George Eliot
The Lifted Veil, George Eliot
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The Lifted Veil

Author: George Eliot

Narrator: Clive Chafer

Unabridged: 1 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/16/2016


Synopsis

George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil was first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1859 and has now become one of the author’s most widely read and critically discussed stories. Told from the point of view of a young, egocentric, and morbid clairvoyant man, Latimer, it is a dark fantasy portrait of an artist whose visionary powers merely blight his life. The story reflected the scientific interest of the time in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism, phrenology, and experiments in revivification. It also is a reflection of the author’s moral philosophy.The Lifted Veil is a significant part of the Victorian tradition of horror fiction, along with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

About George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) (1819-80) was a philosopher, journalist and translator before she became a novelist, her first stories being published in 1856. She led an unconventional life, co-editing the liberal journal Westminster Review for three years and living with the married man and philosopher George Henry Lewes. Her novels are among the greatest of the nineteenth century

About Clive Chafer

Clive Chafer is a professional actor, director, producer, and theater instructor. Originally from England and educated at Leeds and Exeter universities, he has performed and directed at many theaters in the San Francisco area, where he makes his home, and elsewhere in the US. In 1993 he founded TheatreFIRST, Oakland’s professional theater company, where he served as artistic director until 2008. 


Reviews

Goodreads review by Peter on July 27, 2020

The story was a bit tedious starting with a flashback of a dying man on the days of his life. We hear about his education, his effeminate character, the brother, the successful father, his relationship to a close friend of his, Meunier. After his brother's death, mysterious Bertha is married to the......more

Goodreads review by Lynne on May 06, 2016

And she made me believe that she loved me. Without every quitting her tone of badinage and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I was near to her, submitting to her playful tyranny. It costs a woman so little effort......more

Goodreads review by Lee on September 14, 2023

Flowing first-person old-timey "overwritten" prose, an unhinged Gothic psychohorror starring the clairvoyant Romantic poet aristocratic narrator haunted by premonitions of Prague and marriage to his brother's beguiling bride Bertha, characterized as a sort of devious and delusive (<-- a word I've le......more

Goodreads review by John on December 20, 2024

A supernatural novella tale of seeing into the future. A sickly man finds he can see into the future. His strong healthy brother dies leaving him available to marry his brothers fiancé. However, Bertha does not love him and instead despises him. Interesting reading about injecting live blood in dead......more

Goodreads review by Werner on July 01, 2021

This book won't be every reader's cup of tea. As the above description suggests, its subject matter was atypical for Eliot --though she wrote it in 1859, her publishers found it so different from her usual work that they delayed printing it until 1878. Premised as it is on psychic phenomena --flashe......more


Quotes

“Enormously intelligent.” New York Times

“[An] indisputably great work.” New York Observer

“George Eliot’s Gothic story…continues her preoccupation with human communication and sympathy through the figure of the telepathic narrator. Latimer, one of her least likeable characters, suffers tremendously under his heightened awareness of others’ petty and selfish thoughts. Latimer chooses to tell the story of his abilities as a tale of disability, a kind of pathography about his gift…The vehemence of his disgust for human frailties suggests that Latimer’s pain derives at least in part from his failure of empathy for others…Thus, his uncanny hearing unmasks a kind of sympathetic deafness to others, and his progressive heart disease indexes the shriveling of his capacity for human love and friendship.” Literature Arts Medicine Database