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The First Angsty Telepath: George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil”
The double-whammy curse of clairvoyance and telepathy may be too much for a sensitive Victorian soul…
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on August 27, 2025
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil,” first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859 and available on Project Gutenberg. Spoilers ahead!
Latimer begins his account by confiding that he’s foreseen his death. It will occur in one month, as he sits in his study, “longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.” He hopes his strange story may earn the sympathy he never received in life.
His mother died when he was seven, leaving the hypersensitive child with a dutiful but emotionally distant father. His older brother, Alfred, receives the usual uppercrust classical education. Latimer is forced to study science and engineering with private tutors. The subjects leave him cold—he prefers soaking in Nature’s beauty to conquering its mystery.
At sixteen he goes to Geneva, where he discovers that his poetic sensibility isn’t linked to productive talent. He befriends Charles Meunier, an orphan with a genius for medicine who will play a critical part in Latimer’s later life. A serious illness ends Latimer’s Geneva “studies.” His father means for him to recuperate on a leisurely tour to Vienna, then back through Prague…
In a strange waking dream, Latimer envisions Prague as a sunstruck place of people doomed to “perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the new birth of morning.” Of many details, he particularly remembers star-shaped lamplight cast on pavement. He hopes his illness has cleared his mental obstructions to poetry, but can’t recreate the vision.
One day he sees his father enter his room with an English neighbor, Mrs. Filmore, and a young woman. The girl regards him with the acuteness of a fey creature. The group vanishes, leaving Latimer wondering if his illness has given him a new power—or a new symptom of madness. Shortly his father, Mrs. Filmore and the girl arrive, just as he saw them before. Shocked, Latimer faints. He passes off his collapse as convalescent weakness. His father introduces the girl as Bertha Grant, Mrs. Filmore’s niece, whom Alfred may marry.
A new phase in Latimer’s “abnormal sensibility” surfaces. He begins, involuntarily, to discern the thoughts of people around him. This “superadded consciousness” becomes painful, forcing him to see beneath people’s outward behavior to their suppressed egoism, capricious memories, and disjointed thoughts. When Alfred arrives, Latimer senses the “half-pitying contempt” underlying his brotherly facade. He comes to hate Alfred, a rival for Bertha’s heart.
How could Latimer not love Bertha? She’s the only human whose thoughts he can’t sense. She remains a compelling mystery, in whom he imagines depths of soul masked by her outward flippancy. One afternoon, walking arm in arm with her, he slips into a prevision of them years hence, a married couple bound together by mutual hatred. He thrills to think they’ll marry, yet clings to the hope that Prague will be nothing like his prevision. It’s still possible that his fancies stem from a diseased mind rather than a prophetic soul. But when he searches Prague for the patch of lamplight that dominated his vision—he finds it in reality.
Back in England, Alfred and Bertha become engaged. Latimer sees Bertha frequently. One day he lets slip his belief that they’ll marry. She’s startled but recovers quickly. At home, though, they learn that Alfred has been thrown from a horse and killed. Latimer’s father gradually accepts his new heir. Latimer and Bertha marry, and enjoy the social whirl of wealthy newlyweds.
Latimer’s father falls ill not long afterwards. On the night he dies, the veil lifts that’s hidden Bertha’s mind from Latimer. Where he envisioned a beautiful landscape, he finds a “narrow room” of a soul housing “petty artifice… repulsion and antipathy hardening into cruel hatred.”
The following years are a misery. Latimer becomes reclusive while Bertha rises in society. She’s seen as a charming woman shackled to a sickly, “crack-brained” husband. Bertha suspects Latimer’s supernatural insight, and both despises him as an imbecile and fears him as an inquisitor. His prevision of her wishing for his death comes true, but aloud she says only that she’s hiring a new maid.
The maid, Mrs. Archer, shares her mistress’s contempt for Latimer. Eventually Bertha contracts “a mingled feeling of fear and dependence” towards Archer. Latimer experiences flashes of the two locking something in Bertha’s cabinet. Meanwhile he finds his telepathy dimming, even as his visions increase. Instead of Prague, he sees “shady plains… gigantic ruins… midnight skies with strange bright constellations.” In all these scenes, he’s aware of “the presence of something unknown and pitiless.” Recurrent, too, is the vision of his death. He’s grateful to lose awareness of Bertha’s “inner self.” Lately she seems in “a state of… hopeful suspense.”
A visit from Charles Meunier rouses Latimer from inertia. Meunier’s become a medical celebrity and Latimer considers admitting his mental struggles, but shrinks from the disclosure.
Bertha’s grown cold toward Archer, but when the maid falls ill she appoints herself chief nurse. Meunier’s diagnosis is fatal peritonitis. He asks Latimer’s permission to perform a postmortem experiment—he’s reluctant to involve Bertha, due to the experiment’s startling effects.
The night Archer dies, Meunier sends everyone but Latimer out of the room. With Latimer’s help, Meunier injects his own blood into the corpse. Amazingly, Archer begins breathing on her own. Bertha returns. She cries out when Archer’s eyes open, wide with hateful recognition. Archer accuses Bertha of planning to poison Latimer, with a concoction Archer secured for her and hid in the cabinet. Then Archer’s vitality drains, and she sinks back into death.
Meunier’s pledged to remain silent about Bertha’s guilt, and Latimer and Bertha have lived apart since then. Latimer’s insight reawakens and torments him with awareness of the Unseen Presence, and the mental clamor of his servants.
On September 20, 1850, as foreseen, his narrative ends with his life.
What’s Cyclopean: Latimer fears that, if his powers were known, he’d be considered an “energumen” possessed by devils.
“Brevity,” he comments, “is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.” Spoken like an author whose word count is running over.
Libronomicon: Latimer’s brother Alfred dismisses Latin and Greek classics, his opinion based on Potter’s Aeschylus and part of Francis’ Horace. Latimer, meanwhile, sneaks away from his science tutors to read Plutarch and Shakespeare and Don Quixote.
Madness Takes Its Toll: To be “finely organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres that responded to pleasure” sounds all too much like chronic depression.
Anne’s Commentary
What do you do when you can’t find a fitting epigraph for your story, no matter how you dig through your classical authors, your Bible, your Shakespeare and Milton and other usually reliable sources?
You write your own epigraph, which is what George Eliot does to start “The Lifted Veil” off with a thematic bang:
“Give me no light, great Heavens, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers beyond the growing heritage
That makes complete manhood.”
Lacking an attribution, I searched for the epigraph’s origin. I was betting on one of the English Romantic poets Eliot often favors. No points for me. I mean, it would be awkwardly egotistical to attribute your epigraph to yourself, right?
In an ideal story world, this epigraph would have been Latimer’s cri de coeur, the lesson he took from his harrowing experiences with mental faculties beyond the common lot. Eliot doesn’t do ideal story worlds, though many of her characters are idealists. For Latimer, a perfect world would be one in which people would leave him alone to bask in passive appreciation of beauty and not expect him to perform feats of mechanical engineering. Nor would anyone, including himself, expect him to mine poems out of his hypersensitive sensibilities. He doesn’t want extraordinary abilities; though unacquainted with the Spider-Verse, he knows that great power comes with great responsibilities, and responsibilities are more his father’s thing.
Epigraph’s cousin is epitaph—the two are often mistaken for each other. “Veil” features an epitaph that, like Eliot’s story-topper, was written by the person who would lie under it, actually or metaphorically, that is, Jonathan Swift’s “ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit.” Latimer acknowledges that he’s no Swift. Still, for him as well as for the great Irish satirist, “[the grave] is where fierce indignation can no longer wound the heart.” No wonder Latimer dies of heart failure, given the frequency with which he has felt this organ bruised.
While Eliot may never have read Edgar Allen Poe, her one essay into supernatural fiction reminds me of his “confessionals,” like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “Ligeia.” Latimer rivals Poe’s first-person narrators in his morbid sensitivity and the overwrought emotional life he leads, especially after the unspecified ailment that ends his Geneva studies. There’s an extremely rare sequela to central nervous system injury or illness called acquired savant syndrome: Following such trauma, the brain may “rewire” itself so that previously absent or unsuspected (perhaps dormant) abilities manifest in the patient. Latimer doesn’t suddenly become a genius mathematician, artist, musician, or, for that matter, poet. He gets his lifelong sensitivities, particularly to sound, amplified into supernaturally acute hearing, even of thoughts. It’s interesting, too, that he was temporarily blind in early childhood, but develops supernaturally acute vision after his illness, extending it into the future and even to another plane of existence.
If Lovecraft read “The Lifted Veil,” he doesn’t appear to have mentioned it in his critical essays or letters, including Supernatural Horror in Literature, which covers many mid-19th-century Victorian works. Unless Eliot had a prevision like Latimer’s, we can safely say she never read Lovecraft. Of course, the idea of parallel existences or worlds goes way, way back, to such ancient mythologies as the Norse, Hindu and Buddhist. Eliot’s contribution to the idea is that beyond the “veil” of the mundane may lie the visionary landscape into which Latimer begins to escape during his marital miseries. Not unlike Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, Latimer’s alternate reality ranges from homely elements like “grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs” to alien ones like “strange cities… gigantic ruins… midnight skies with strange constellations.”
Not unlike Lovecraft’s Old Ones that walk “not in the spaces we know but between them… serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen,” Latimer’s visionary world is occupied—perhaps ruled over—by “something unknown and pitiless…[an] Unknown Presence revealed and yet hidden by the moving curtain of the earth and sky.” It’s not the Christian God in whom Latimer’s lost faith. The only worship available to him now is “a worship of devils.”
Of Bertha, I have only the space to opine that she outnasties other antiheroines like Becky Sharp, Undine Spragg and Scarlett O’Hara in that she seems to have no redeeming traits whatsoever.
I’m undecided about Charles Meunier. Eliot introduces him early on as a medical genius in the making. Still, when he reappears at the climax to reanimate Mrs. Archer, he strikes me as a bit of a Mad Scientist Ex Machina.
Overall, “Veil” does make me wish Eliot had ventured again into the realm of the weird.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Anne described this story to me as having Poe-esque and Lovecraftian feels. But my first, second, and third thoughts were not about those luminaries, but about Shelley. There is certainly some gothic weirdness here, but it is intensely Romantic.
Also there’s a walk-on by a version of Victor Frankenstein who actually got his doctorate and doesn’t faint all the time.
Shelley’s characters, in addition to seeking to combat death via Science, are prone to angst, swoons, and regretting their decisions. It’s charming in an exasperating way, or exasperating in a charming way, depending on my mood. Presumably this is also how people felt about Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s models for fainting, rash action, and dramatic brooding.
Latimer isn’t rash, per se, and is surrounded by people who don’t find his depression or chronic illness romantic—really, he would have done better in a Shelley story that assumed these characteristics near-universal. His tragedy is that he’s sensitive but not a poet, and thus unable to transform his broodings into popular meter. His tutors aim to counter rather than leverage his natural tendencies, thus ensuring that he’ll develop no strong talents.
Even worse for a sensitive soul, the poor boy is clairvoyant and telepathic. Shelley presages Eliot; Eliot presages Uncanny X-Men. You need a fair amount of generosity to put up with everyone’s unfiltered thoughts, and Latimer is misanthropic to begin with. I have little patience for angst, and yet… we’ve discussed previously the terror of being seeing strange dimensions overlapping our own, things beyond normal human ken. Is it really better to see too much even if it’s entirely within human ken? I get annoyed enough when people chat about Pokémon Go while I’m trying to concentrate—how much worse to hear every thought in their heads? It’s an introvert’s nightmare even if people like you. And if you’re constantly annoyed about their thoughts, the odds of them liking you are low.
Latimer begins, briefly, to sense an entity beyond the human: “the presence of something unknown and pitiless” amid “strange cities” and “gigantic ruins” and “midnight skies with strange bright constellations.” But he’s not sensitive enough to make a whole Lovecraftian tale out of this; it’s merely as an extension of his misery with humans.
Naturally, a telepath will be attracted to someone they can’t read, whose thoughts might actually be worthwhile. (Eliot presages Twilight.) Knowing the reverse via clairvoyance doesn’t help—after all, Latimer points out, how often do we follow current temptation over future good when superpowers aren’t involved?
Bertha is interesting, despite Latimer’s disgust with her social maneuvering. For one thing, her sarcasm suggests some sensitivity beneath her surface thoughts: some need to protect herself from deeper pain. She’s in the sort of position where social maneuvers and marriages of convenience are expected, and has to find ways to live with it. But the thing that really jumps out at me is one line: “I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and that was the reason why you were so bitter against other clairvoyants, wanting to keep your monopoly.”
Is there a reason she starts out opaque to Latimer? Is her initial fascination with Latimer that she, too, has seen their future marriage? And does she see his sensibilities as weakness because that’s how she sees her own?
If so, it’s ironic that their mutual foresight leads to no advantages, no great deeds or destinies—just a quietly miserable marriage like a thousand others in the absence of no-fault divorce, and a poisoning that never comes to fruition. Only Meunier—free of the burden of supernatural vision—gets real-world accomplishments. And only he gets to precipitate any sort of change for Latimer and Bertha.
Next week, join us for our new longread with Chapters 0-2 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster![end-mark]
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