None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Latimer Grant is a young Victorian man too sensitive for banking, too inarticulate for poetry, too pale for fox-hunting, and possessed of an absolutely catastrophic gift. After a grave illness in Geneva he discovers he can read other people's minds, involuntarily and always at the worst moment. The thoughts of every acquaintance flood his skull like an orchestra tuning permanently, except those of one person.
That one exception is Bertha Grant, a blond, sharp-eyed creature with the warmth of a marble medallion and the conversational style of a dagger wrapped in silk. She alone remains a mystery to him, and because he can hear every other soul on the continent, her closed mind is the most intoxicating thing he has ever encountered. He falls for her with full fervour.
Latimer's brother Alfred, whose inner life consists almost entirely of self-congratulation and equestrian enthusiasm, is already engaged to Bertha. Latimer watches the courtship from inside Alfred's own satisfied skull, which is precisely as awful as it sounds. But Eliot, who has the timing of a superior card-player, arranges Alfred's exit from the story via a horse, a hill, and a concussion, leaving the estate, the income, and the inconvenient question of Bertha's future all to be resolved by a cold April morning and a wedding that the groom has already foreseen in a vision so terrible he shuddered for days.
The marriage is, to no one's surprise except the guests, a sustained and expert catastrophe. Bertha, once legally secured, drops the mystique she wore like a borrowed hat, and Latimer's gift operates on her fully at last: what he finds inside that elegant skull is contempt so thorough it constitutes a kind of artistry.
They inhabit the same house, she brilliant at dinner parties, he shrinking from his own servants whose petty thoughts assault him around the clock. Then a disquieting maid named Mrs. Archer appears, and a visiting doctor named Meunier proposes to conduct a rather unconventional medical experiment on a dying woman. The results of that experiment will surface a secret so cold and specific that even a man who can read minds will be thunderstruck to hear it spoken aloud.
George Eliot wrote "The Lifted Veil" in 1859 while simultaneously being one of the most formidable intellects in Victorian England and a woman who published under a man's name because the era trusted trousers more than talent. Mary Ann Evans chose her pen name because she knew exactly how thick the veil over women's minds was kept by respectable society, which gives the story's central metaphor a unique biographical edge.
Total knowledge of another person destroys the very thing that makes love possible. Latimer can hear every soul except Bertha's, and that silence is what he worships. The moment the veil lifts and her inner life floods in, what remains is a cold room with bad wallpaper.
Eliot compresses seven years of marital ruin into a few paragraphs. There is genuinely little to say about misery that compounds daily. Every era produces people who fall in love with their own projections. The Victorian corset merely gave the delusion better posture. Today the same mechanism runs on curated social media profiles, which are just flashy veils.
Foreknowledge offered Latimer precisely zero protection against desire. He absorbed the warning, shuddered appropriately, and proceeded regardless, which is what people have always done with good advice. My advice to you is to read this short genius work.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Latimer Grant is a young Victorian man too sensitive for banking, too inarticulate for poetry, too pale for fox-hunting, and possessed of an absolutely catastrophic gift. After a grave illness in Geneva he discovers he can read other people's minds, involuntarily and always at the worst moment. The thoughts of every acquaintance flood his skull like an orchestra tuning permanently, except those of one person.
That one exception is Bertha Grant, a blond, sharp-eyed creature with the warmth of a marble medallion and the conversational style of a dagger wrapped in silk. She alone remains a mystery to him, and because he can hear every other soul on the continent, her closed mind is the most intoxicating thing he has ever encountered. He falls for her with full fervour.
Latimer's brother Alfred, whose inner life consists almost entirely of self-congratulation and equestrian enthusiasm, is already engaged to Bertha. Latimer watches the courtship from inside Alfred's own satisfied skull, which is precisely as awful as it sounds. But Eliot, who has the timing of a superior card-player, arranges Alfred's exit from the story via a horse, a hill, and a concussion, leaving the estate, the income, and the inconvenient question of Bertha's future all to be resolved by a cold April morning and a wedding that the groom has already foreseen in a vision so terrible he shuddered for days.
The marriage is, to no one's surprise except the guests, a sustained and expert catastrophe. Bertha, once legally secured, drops the mystique she wore like a borrowed hat, and Latimer's gift operates on her fully at last: what he finds inside that elegant skull is contempt so thorough it constitutes a kind of artistry.
They inhabit the same house, she brilliant at dinner parties, he shrinking from his own servants whose petty thoughts assault him around the clock. Then a disquieting maid named Mrs. Archer appears, and a visiting doctor named Meunier proposes to conduct a rather unconventional medical experiment on a dying woman. The results of that experiment will surface a secret so cold and specific that even a man who can read minds will be thunderstruck to hear it spoken aloud.
George Eliot wrote "The Lifted Veil" in 1859 while simultaneously being one of the most formidable intellects in Victorian England and a woman who published under a man's name because the era trusted trousers more than talent. Mary Ann Evans chose her pen name because she knew exactly how thick the veil over women's minds was kept by respectable society, which gives the story's central metaphor a unique biographical edge.
Total knowledge of another person destroys the very thing that makes love possible. Latimer can hear every soul except Bertha's, and that silence is what he worships. The moment the veil lifts and her inner life floods in, what remains is a cold room with bad wallpaper.
Eliot compresses seven years of marital ruin into a few paragraphs. There is genuinely little to say about misery that compounds daily. Every era produces people who fall in love with their own projections. The Victorian corset merely gave the delusion better posture. Today the same mechanism runs on curated social media profiles, which are just flashy veils.
Foreknowledge offered Latimer precisely zero protection against desire. He absorbed the warning, shuddered appropriately, and proceeded regardless, which is what people have always done with good advice. My advice to you is to read this short genius work.
❤️ 🇮🇱