Knowing too much: The Burden of Omniscience in The Lifted Veil

Authors

Melissa Raines

Date of this Version

2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 43 (2012)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

In the spring of 1859, not long after the success of her first novel, Adam Bede, George Eliot submitted a much shorter work to her publisher, John Blackwood, for his consideration. Blackwood's eventual letter in response to the piece arrived more than a fortnight later and had to be prompted by Eliot's partner, George Henry Lewes. Perhaps Blackwood's belated reply was somewhat understandable: he must initially have been thrilled by the prospect of another submission from the rising new author, but the strangeness of this undeniably macabre new tale unsettled him. A story of supernatural power and science that pushed the boundaries of the acceptable was quite probably the last thing he expected from a recently acclaimed realist writer. While he praised the story for being 'full of thought and most beautifully written', he also added hesitantly, already being well acquainted with Eliot's sensitivity to criticism, 'I wish the theme had been a happier one, and I think you must have been worrying yourself and disturbing yourself about something when you wrote.' In spite of Blackwood's concerns, The Lifted Veil was published in his magazine in July of 1859 - without George Eliot's name, but with (at George Eliot's insistence) the final transfusion scene. This was the scene which, out of all of the passages in the story, Blackwood objected to the most.

The objection, not just to the grisly transfusion scene but to the novella as a whole, has largely persisted. Until recent decades, it received scant critical attention, and as Beryl Gray expresses it, The Lifted Veil 'seems to arouse embarrassment rather than interest, as if there were a general wish either that it had not been written at all or that it had been written by someone more appropriate'.2 George Eliot herself seemed rather troubled by the story's place among her longer works, and when, nearly two decades after The Lifted Veil's initial publication, Blackwood suggested that it be released again, the writer hesitated, and eventually said no ... at least for the moment. She attempted to explain her mixed feelings to her publisher:

I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies and which justifies its painfulness [ ...]. But it will be well to put the story in harness with some other productions of mine, and not send it forth in its disrnalloneliness. There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put them in any other form. But we must wait a little.