ABSTRACT
Chapter I starts by noticing George Eliot's (GE) depressive emotional state from which ‘The Lifted Veil’ (LV) emerged in 1859 and begins discussing the story by examining a series of preparatory texts that contain evident links and foreshadowings (GE's literary reviews in the Westminster, her travel diaries, a few youthful prose sketches). Among these are two long essays concerning the poets Heine and Young, delineating two divergent aesthetics of poetry. Also relevant are detailed travelogues that Eliot wrote, which already show that ‘vision’ may be contradicted by verified reality, the concept around which chapter I of ‘The Lifted Veil’ revolves. This chapter I of George Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil’: A Sequential and Contextual Reading closes with an overview of Eliot's fiction preceding LV and enumerates and analyzes many thematic, conceptual, and structural preannouncements.
