SOURCE: Redinger, Ruby V. “My Present Past.” In George Eliot: The Emergent Self, pp. 295-460. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

In the following excerpt, Redinger discusses the circumstances surrounding the publication of “The Lifted Veil” and addresses similarities between Eliot and the protagonist of the story, Latimer.

By disentangling herself from the Liggins affair and relaxing her hold on anonymity, George Eliot only intensified her problems with the Blackwoods. Signs that her publishers would be wary over using her pseudonym whenever it was given an identity had been present ever since the middle of June, when they refused to agree to affix the name to “The Lifted Veil,” the last fiction of hers to appear in Maga. But earlier—just as in the beginning of the talk about her new novel—the privilege of using that name was the major reason for wanting a work from her to...