George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’

The negative historical judgment given to George Eliots The Lifted Veil amounts nowadays to a gross critical blunder, and in the last three decades the story has been firmly reinstated in Eliots major canon. The premise of the present book is that George Eliots oeuvre is a compact macrotext where themes, motifs, patterns and cultural and personal archetypes recur with variations, and that The Lifted Veil functions as the linchpin of this oeuvre. A sequential approach to the story is authorized by the use of a mimetic enunciation that simulates a gradual definition of events, places, and characters as they have appeared to the narrating I in the course of time until the moment of the enunciation. Contextualizing The Lifted Veil means placing it within Eliots oeuvre and against the background of Victorian mid-century fiction; in a further meaning, seeing it as intersecting various contemporary genres and subgenres, such as that of the European and American literature of the veil, that of the archetypal icon of the femme fatale, that of Wilkie Collinss dead secret novels. The most significant facet that critical literature on The Lifted Veil has tended to overlook is however the encrypting of the experience of a failed religious conversion and the foreshadowing of the search for a spiritual and racial identity of Daniel Deronda, the hero of Eliots final novel.