serpents and sylphs and psychics and George Eliot (!)

[lotesse]

I read George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil" for the first time, and - seriously, how do I keep missing Eliot stuff? By all rights I should have read her as a child. I would've loved her then. Not that I don't now, but! Anyway, TLV is thoroughly great. Deliciously typical gothic stuff, with psychics and visions and blood transfusions that can bring you back from the dead. Also, fascinatingly, did that same thing Mary Shelley always does with the male protag/first person gender identity confusion - speaks as an "I" through the body of a man. Which femmes out the protag significantly - and attractively. Apparently the first person is required for the gothic?

And of course it's not nearly as good as Middlemarch, but I couldn't put it down. Why are psychic visions so damn pleasing, anyway? *Wriggles*

Now, back to reading too much criticism and not enough fiction.

Comments

[sistermagpie]

I remember for the longest time having a joke with a friend about how that book didn't exist because we could never find it anywhere, but it was always mentioned as one of her works.But I did finally track it down and read it!

[lotesse]

What did you think of it?

[sistermagpie]

I remember loving it. I had no idea about the subject matter before I read it so it was like a happy surprise when I actually read it.

[lotesse]

I feel so much less distanced from her all of a sudden! Her anti-romanticism bent does tend to make me feel lowbrow and gawky and outsiderish with her, though I love her novels.

[ilthit]

Middlemarch remains the only Eliot novel I ever read, despite the fact that it was mindblowingly good. Some parts of it annoyed me just because they weren't as mindblowingly good as the rest, which is the most criticism I can throw at it.

I think the only gothic novels I've read were Lady Audley's Secret (very bad) and Northanger Abbey (very good, but a parody of gothic novels rather than a gothic novel itself) and they were both written in third person. Oh! Well, except Dracula and Frankenstein are gothic novels, of course, but Dracula isn't straight-up single-pov narration.

[lotesse]

Lady Audley's Secret? Sporfle. def. not the strongest example of the genre. But Northanger Abbey is lovely.

If you ever want Eliot again, I suggest The Mill on the Floss. Pastoral Bildungsroman about a smart angry not-pretty girl.