The Lifted Veil: Women's 19th Century Stories

The Lifted Veil: Women's 19th-Century Stories. London: The Folio Society, 2005, First Print Thus. Introduced by Kathryn Hughes, illustrated by Peter Suart. 251 × 176 × 54 mm. Pp. [i–iv] v–xvii [xviii], [1–2] 3–498 [499–502]: [12] leaves of colour plates. Type: Bulmer. Printed and bound by Cambridge University Press. Full red artificial cloth with a design in dark blue, cream and gold by Suart; dark blue endleaves. Dark blue slip case.

Near-fine copy with pages clean, bright and tightly bound. In like slipcase that is just a little dinged in placed, with a hint of shelf-wear and a very shallow bump to rear.

Contents include:

• Jane Austen: The Watsons (1804)
• Mary Shelley: Maurice, or the Fisher’s Cot (1820)
• Charlotte Brontë: The Green Dwarf (c. 1833)
• Elizabeth Gaskell: The Grey Woman (1861)
• Louisa May Alcott: A Whisper in the Dark (1863)
• George Eliot: The Lifted Veil (1878)
• Kate Chopin: A Pair of Silk Stockings (c. 1884)
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Fatal Marriage (1885)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)
• Olive Schreiner: The Buddhist Priest’s Wife (1893)
• Edith Wharton: Souls Belated (1899)
• Charlotte Mew: The China Bowl (1899)

From the Folio Society 2005 Magazine:

'WOMEN WRITE THE BEST NOVELS, the best travels, the best reviews, the best leaders,’ George Henry Lewes ruefully acknowledged in 1850. They also wrote the best short stories. Across both sides of the Atlantic and in Australia, weekly and monthly magazines flourished and as they did, so did the literary careers of many women. The 19th century became a Golden Age. Society was changing and women’s short-story writing embraced the change.

In Jane Austen’s spirited fragment, ‘The Watsons’, the heroine finds her marriage opportunities restricted by poverty and pride. Charlotte Brontë’s ‘The Green Dwarf’, a witty, engrossing tale of two suitors battling for the hand of an orphan girl against political upheaval in the imaginary country of Verdopolis, is a prime example of the essentially gothic romances that characterised the early years. Elizabeth Gaskell and Louisa May Alcott became experts in the genre. George Eliot even interrupted work on The Mill on the Floss to pen ‘The Lifted Veil’ — the haunting title story in this collection, in which a dying man, with a dangerous talent for clairvoyance, looks back on a lethal marriage.

As the century drew to a close, daring new fiction, spearheaded by Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Olive Schreiner, shocked critics of the day with its frank representations of female sexuality, marital discontent and literary aspiration. This new collection spans an extraordinary range of narrative voices, and explores topics as various as sexual passion and familial love, the right to education and the constraints of class, luxurious living in the ‘silver fork society’ and the lure of the supernatural.