Synopses & Reviews
The two novellas in this volume-one Gothic, the other satiric-offer dark counterpoint to the warm humanism of Eliot's novels. The Lifted Veil is the story of Latimer, a mindreader with psychic powers. His brother's fiancée, Bertha, is the one person whose mind remains closed to him, arousing an undeniable curiosity, until his brother dies and he and Bertha marry-when he can finally see her intentions. In Brother Jacob, David Faux is driven by self-interest and greed to create a false life for himself as a confectioner in Jamaica. To David's surprise, it is his idiot brother, Jacob, who proves to be his nemesis.
This edition includes an introduction that places the novellas within the context of modern psychology and relates them to Eliot's longer fiction.
About the Author
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross) was born on November 22, 1819 at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, England. She received an ordinary education and, upon leaving school at the age of sixteen, embarked on a program of independent study to further her intellectual growth. In 1841 she moved with her father to Coventry, where the influences of “skeptics and rationalists” swayed her from an intense religious devoutness to an eventual break with the church. The death of her father in 1849 left her with a small legacy and the freedom to pursue her literary inclinations. In 1851 she became the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a position she held for three years. In 1854 came the fated meeting with George Henry Lewes, the gifted editor of The Leader, who was to become her adviser and companion for the next twenty-four years. Her first book, Scenes of a Clerical Life (1858), was followed by Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1872). The death of Lewes, in 1878, left her stricken and lonely. On May 6, 1880, she married John Cross, a friend of long standing, and after a brief illness she died on December 22 of that year, in London.