The Lifted Veil, and Brother Jacob (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Eliot, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199555052 ISBN 13: 9780199555055

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2009

Synopsis

`She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things.'

The Lifted Veil was first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859. A dark fantasy woven from contemporary scientific interest in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism, phrenology and experiments in revification it is Eliot's anatomy of her own moral philsophy - the ideal of imaginative sympathy or the ability to see into others' minds and emotions. Narrated by an egoccentric, morbid young clairvoyant man whose fascination for Bertha Grant lies partly in her obliquity, the story also explores fiction's ability to offer insight into the self, as well as being a remarkable portrait of a misdeveloped artist whose visionary powers merely blight his life. The Lifted Veil is now one of the most widely read and critically discussed of Eliot's works.

Published as a companion piece to The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob is by contrast Eliot's literary homage to Thackeray, a satirical modern fable that draws telling parallels between eating and reading. Yet both stories reveal Eliot's deep engagement with the question of whether there are 'necessary truths' independent of our perception of them and the boundaries of art and the self. Helen Small's introduction casts new light on works which fully deserve to be read alongside Eliot's novels.

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About this title

About the Author:

Mary Ann Evans, one of the most brilliant of Victorian novelists, published under the pen name 'George Eliot, she said, because she wanted her works to be taken seriously and to distance herself from the women novelists whom she considered silly. She was the assistant editor of the left - leaning Westminster Review, to which she contributed many literary essays. From 1854 on, she lived with G. H. Lewes. By 1859, she was celebrity novelist, and she wrote popular novels for the next 15 years.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0199555052
• ISBN 13: 9780199555055
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160
• Editor: Small Helen