George Eliot is best known for Middlemarch, but she also wrote an early work of science fiction
- Written by: Jessica Murray, Lecturer, The University of Western Australia
George Eliot – the pen name of Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans – is celebrated today as a writer of realist novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871) and Daniel Deronda (1876).
We don’t tend to associate her with science fiction. But in 1859, as she was embarking on her career as a novelist, Eliot published a short science-fiction novel titled The Lifted Veil.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is often credited as the first “science fiction” novel, but in the mid-1800s the term was rare. It was used to describe literature depicting aspects of current scientific thought. It became popular as a genre term in the late 19th century, when it was applied to the work of speculative writers, such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
The Lifted Veil is science fiction in both senses. It complicates our view of Eliot as a realist writer and provides an insight into the scientific aspects of her later realist work.
The Lifted Veil is a first-person account of the life of a man named Latimer who is writing his story because he knows he is soon to die. Following a severe illness as a young man, his sensitivity has heightened into an ability to access the minds of others and see into the future.
Latimer’s extrasensory abilities are not imagined as scientific advances. Instead, he is forced into a scientific education to remedy his deficiencies (he describes himself as “sensitive and unpractical”), while secretly reading poetry and literature.
Possessing a keenly poetic sensibility without the talent to vent it, Latimer develops what feels to him “like a preternaturally heightened sense of hearing, making audible a roar of sound where others find perfect stillness”.
Sympathy and literature
Essential to Eliot’s realism was the idea of sympathy. As a teenager, she was intensely evangelical. She criticised her older brother for attending the theatre, refused to read novels (except for those of Sir Walter Scott), and once devolved into hysterics at a party after hearing secular music.
In her twenties, however, her relationship with Christianity grew complicated. Eliot ceased believing in the miraculous elements of the Bible. Influenced by new works of German philosophy, which she translated into English, she began to see relationships between human beings as the cornerstone of morality.
To grow morally and intellectually, for Eliot, meant widening our experience beyond our narrow individual lives, entering into the experiences of others very different from us.
She saw literature – particularly the realist novel – as uniquely capable of extending our sympathies, because literature can make us feel as well as think. An important aspect of her realism is her subtle depiction of the inner lives of her characters. She criticised Charles Dickens for what she saw as his “frequently false psychology”.
In Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, the drama arises from the characters misreading one another. They cannot unveil the mystery of each other’s minds. The narrator famously observes that if we possessed a “keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life […] we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.
In one of Middlemarch’s most sophisticated plotlines, a young doctor, Lydgate, falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Rosamond. Lydgate is idealistic and ambitious, but his capacity for sympathy is curtailed because his perception of women has been shaped, in part, by popular literature and poetry. He conflates Rosamond’s exterior beauty with her inner life and so overlooks her egoism and superficiality.
When Lydgate thinks about Rosamond, there is a light touch of satire in the way his thoughts take on the flowery qualities of a romance. The marriage, unsurprisingly, is a disaster. Between Lydgate and Rosamond there is “a total missing of each other’s mental track”.
Read more: George Eliot’s Middlemarch: egoism, moral stupidity, and the complex web of life
Science and evolution
A list of Eliot’s reading over her life shows astonishing breadth. She read – in multiple languages – history, theology, classics, poetry, novels and philosophy. A significant portion of her reading comprised works of geology, physiology, physics and evolutionary theory.
Eliot’s partner George Henry Lewes (to whom she was, scandalously, not married) was part of a new school of physiological psychology, influenced by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. Lewes theorised groupings of different neural processes, involving the relations of senses, feelings, mental images and language.
Variations of the phrase “stream of consciousness” are first used in Lewes’ writing, although it is often attributed to later writers. Eliot and Lewes influenced each other in their conceptions of psychology.
Eliot’s realist novels were closely engaged with different strands of 19th-century science. Contemporary readers sometimes criticised her use of language and metaphors drawn from science. A review in the Spectator from 1872 begins:
We all grumble at Middlemarch; we all say that the action is slow, that there is too much parade of scientific and especially physiological knowledge in it.
Such criticism did not deter Eliot. Her writing offers insight into the blended familiarity and strangeness of 19th-century science, as well as its uncanny proximity to fiction. In her final novel, Daniel Deronda, she draws an explicit connection between the speculative work of literature and scientific hypothesising:
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit.
This opening foreshadows the novel’s experimental form, which begins in the middle of the narrative.
Psychology and literature shaped each other
The word “psychology” at this time could suggest different mixtures of philosophical and physiological approaches to the mind and brain. As literary scholar Sally Shuttleworth has shown, literature and psychology shaped one another in the 19th century. Examples from Eliot’s novels were used as case studies in psychological texts.
Articles and lectures in the fields of medicine and physiological psychology addressed problems such as where to locate the soul in the body and whether conscience had its own “special ganglionic centre in the brain”.
Psychiatrists (then called “mental scientists”) were aware of the limits of their physiological knowledge. Addressing the many gaps in empirical enquiry involved speculative work, often influenced by philosophy and theology.
The Lifted Veil envisions the possibility of hearing “that roar on the other side of silence” – that is, fully accessing the minds of others.
Latimer’s foresight initially arises from language: the word “Prague” precipitates a stream of mental images and associations which create his first vision of the future. He experiences the mental process of others as fragmentary “obtrusions” on his mind: “a stream of thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be got rid of”.
Rather than spurring human connection, Latimer’s abilities become a source of Gothic melodrama, as there is no longer anything hidden or uncertain in his life. His “superadded consciousness” seems to open “the souls of those who were in a close relation to me”, but this causes him “intense pain and grief”:
the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.
Latimer becomes obsessed with a woman named Bertha, because she is the only exception. The combined uncertainty and physical attraction that Latimer experiences leads to a deep infatuation:
I could watch the expression of her face, and speculate on its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real interest of ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope and fear.
Yet there is no real affinity between them. She is “keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical”. She is contemptuous of the literature Latimer loves.
This sole element of mystery dissolves. Latimer eventually sees into Bertha’s inner self, which appears to him as “a blank prosaic wall”. It was perhaps the “negation of her soul” that had arrested his insight for so long. Bertha’s growing suspicion that Latimer has some way of knowing her inner thoughts only intensifies her hatred.
Eliot was writing at a time when “science fiction” was beginning to evolve into a genre exploring possible future advances in science. The Lifted Veil has some qualities of science fiction in this sense. During his time at school, Latimer becomes friends with a youth he calls Charles Meunier, whose intellectual passion is science.
Meunier returns at the end of the novel as a brilliant scientist, specialising in the “psychological relations of disease”. Meunier is present when Bertha’s maid, Mrs Archer, becomes fatally unwell. He asks Latimer’s permission to perform an experiment. Human blood transfusions were a new form of medical treatment in the 1800s. But Meunier wants to wait until after Mrs Archer is dead before he transfuses his own blood into her arteries.
The transfusion momentarily restores Mrs Archer to life – “the eyelids quivered, and the soul seemed to have returned beneath them” – in time to expose Bertha’s concealed intention to poison Latimer. The experience awakens Meunier to the experience of life as more than “a scientific problem”.
Latimer’s motivation for writing his story, we realise, is to win the sympathy of readers after his death, which he failed to obtain from those close to him in life.
Authors: Jessica Murray, Lecturer, The University of Western Australia 
