The Lifted Veil (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

By Mary Ann Evans and George Eliot

Mary Anne, better-known by her pen name George Eliot, was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Published in 1859 – thirteen years prior to her seminal novel, Middlemarch – 'The Lifted Veil' is one of her greatest shorter tales. Informed by Eliot's interest in contemporary science, including physiology, phrenology, and mesmerism, it features a telepathic narrator and a staunchly Gothic atmosphere. Many of the earliest occult stories, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Dec 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781447480303

Book preview

MARY ANN EVANS (GEORGE ELIOT)

Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, England in 1819. A highly intelligent child, she was a voracious reader, and started at a young age to question the orthodoxy of the Anglican Church in which she was raised. When she was 21, Evans moved to Coventry, and in 1846 published her first major work – an English translation of the German author Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. Her father became increasingly inpatient with Evans’ questioning of the Christian faith, and to avoid being thrown out she attended church and kept house for him. However, a matter of weeks after his death, at the age of 30, she moved to London, with the intention of becoming a full-time writer.

In 1851, Evans became assistant editor of the campaigning, left-wing journal The Westminster Review, contributing many of her own essays. At this time, a female author heading a literary enterprise was virtually unheard of; to many, the mere sight of an unmarried young woman mixing with the predominantly male society of London was scandalous. Additionally, she conducted what was effectively an open affair with the philosopher and critic, George Henry Lewes. In the mid 1850s, Evans resolved to become a novelist, and adopted the pseudonym for which she would become best-known: George Elliot.

In 1858 (when Evans was 39) Amos Barton, the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, was published in Blackwood’s Magazine. Her first complete novel, Adam Bede was published a year later. Both of these were instant successes, and afforded Evans some degree of fame. After the popularity of Adam Bede, she continued to write for the next fifteen years. She produced six more novels, including her magnum opus, Middlemarch (1875), as well as a good body of poetry and a somewhat out-of-character novella The Lifted Veil (now seen as a significant milestone in the Victorian tradition of horror fiction).

Evans died in 1880, aged 61. She was not buried in Westminster Abbey because of her denial of the Christian faith; instead, she was interred in Highgate Cemetery, London, in the area reserved for religious dissenters or agnostics. Some years after her death, American author Henry James credited her with producing deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man.

THE LIFTED VEIL

by Mary Ann Evans

I

The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burden of this earthly existence. If it were to be otherwise—if I were to live on to the age most men desire and provide for—I should for once have known whether the miseries of delusive expectation can out-weigh the miseries of true prevision. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last moments.

Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o’clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin in my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it. I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation—and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air—will darkness close over them for ever?

Darkness—darkness—no pain—nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward . . .

Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven—the living only from whom men’s indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it—it is