George Eliot is best known for ‘Middlemarch’, but she also wrote an early work of science fiction

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 HG 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...

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