The Lifted Veil

This anthology gathers nineteenth-century short fiction by women, taking its title from George Eliot's tale of a man who sees others' thoughts and his own death. The pieces range from unfinished courtship narrative and early gothic romance to sensation stories of marriage, money, and crime, and to later studies of confinement, clairvoyance, and the strain of respectability. Settings include English towns, American households, and imagined kingdoms. There is no frame story and no single heroine. The book is a period collection of women's narrative, not the Eliot novella printed alone.

12 colour illustrations. Includes the work of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Red pictorial cloth boards. Dark blue endpapers. Dark blue slipcase.