‘The Lifted Veil’, ‘Brother Jacob’, and Short Form

Abstract Eliot’s two novellas ‘The Lifted Veil’ and ‘Brother Jacob’ experiment with generic modes that seem antithetical to her brand of realism: Gothic for the first and satirical fable for the second. In her long novels, dilatory depictions of minds that open sympathetically to other minds aim to assist ‘the growing good of the world’. In contrast, the shorter works render minds either entirely opaque as in the case of the ‘idiot’ Jacob, or else unable to channel the roar of perceptions into sympathetic and meaningful forms of encounter as in ‘The Lifted Veil’. This chapter focuses on the stories’ critical representations of cognitive and moral capacity and incapacity—representations that inhibit rather than foster reader sympathy. Through their unexpected and unsympathetic forms, the tales together reveal surprising links between asylum reform, modern financial speculation, and mid-century imperial governance.