Horror was my familiar.
Published the same year as her first novel, Adam Bede, this overlooked
work displays the gifts for which George Eliot would become
famous--gritty realism, psychological insight, and idealistic
moralizing. It is unique from all her other writing, however, in that it
represents the only time she ever used a first-person narrator, and it
is the only time she wrote about the supernatural.
The tale of a man who is incapacitated by visions of the future and the
cacophony of overheard thoughts, and yet who can't help trying to
subvert his vividly glimpsed destiny, it is easy to read The Lifted
Veil as being autobiographically revealing--of Eliot's sensitivity to
public opinion and her awareness that her days concealed behind a
pseudonym were doomed to a tragic unveiling (as indeed came to pass soon
after this novella's publication). But it is easier still to read the
story as the exciting and genuine precursor of a moody new form, as well
as an absorbing early masterpiece of suspense.
The Art of The Novella Series
Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is
generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a
form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art
Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form
and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented
in book form for the first time.
