Working under the nom de plume George Eliot, gifted writer Mary Anne Evans made a name for herself as one of the foremost innovators in the realm of realistic fiction. In The Lifted Veil, however, she takes a sharp detour from the detailed depictions that characterized novels such as Middlemarch. In this short novel, Evans explores the realm of extrasensory perception, focusing on a protagonist who seems to have been given the ability to peer into the innermost thoughts of those around him—often with disastrous results.