A short work of speculative/science fiction, The Lifted Veil, was published during Eliot's early novel-writing years in 1859.
Published in 1859, the same year as her breakout novel Adam Bede, The Lifted Veil is a novella that stands apart from the rest of George Eliot's body of work for its uncharacteristic engagement with speculative and gothic themes, including clairvoyance, prophetic visions, and a fictional blood transfusion used to reanimate the dead.
The story, narrated in the first person by a man who possesses unwanted telepathic and precognitive abilities, is notable among scholars as an early and unusual foray by Eliot into what would later be recognized as science fiction and psychological horror, genres far removed from her celebrated realist novels of provincial English life.
Though a minor work in her overall corpus, The Lifted Veil is historically significant for revealing the breadth of Eliot's intellectual curiosity, including her serious engagement with contemporary science, physiology, and psychical speculation circulating in Victorian intellectual circles. It demonstrates that even amid her rise to fame as a realist novelist, she was willing to experiment with darker, more speculative modes of storytelling, foreshadowing thematic concerns about determinism, consciousness, and mortality that would recur throughout her later, more famous works.