The Lifted Veil, George Eliot - Susan Payne (essay date 1992)
Susan Payne (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: Payne, Susan. “George Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil’: A Game of Hide and Seek.” In The Strange within the Real: The Function of Fantasy in Austen, Brontë, and Eliot, pp. 123-67. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1992.
[In the following essay, Payne provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of “The Lifted Veil” and discusses the reaction to the story from her publisher, critics, and readers.]
1. THE GENESIS OF “THE LIFTED VEIL”
To link the name of George Eliot, who was as uncompromisingly and unselfconsciously sérieuse as we like to think only a Victorian intellectual could be, with the concept of play, seems, at the very least, paradoxical. And yet Eliot herself, when she first mentions “The Lifted Veil” in a letter dated March 1st, 1859, specifically uses the term jeu, telling Blackwood, her publisher:
I have a slight story of an outré kind—not a...
[The entire page is 18300 words long]
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