In the following essay, Wallace sees "The Lifted Veil" as demonstrating the "failures and delusions of memory," a challenge to "Wordsworth's assertion of recollection as the foundation of both poetry and human community."

Although The Lifted Veil is still little-read, influential critical evaluations by Terry Eagleton, Gillian Beer, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar offer us excellent points of access to this deeply pessimistic novella. Gilbert and Gubar, in particular, work to define the intersecting investigations of sexual and artistic identity that outline George Eliot's difficulties in being both woman and writer. All the extant treatments focus on Latimer's prescience and clairvoyance, and on the failures or dangers of his supernaturally enhanced perceptions. But Latimer has yet another mode of perception that lifts the veil of temporality, one commonly available to us all and one insistently identified as a crucial element of artistic vision during the nineteenth...