You probably know George Eliot as the author of legendary dramatic works like Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss-but did you know she also wrote sci-fi tales of gothic horror?
First published anonymously in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859, this short but skin-crawling tale is very different to Eliot's literary realist works. Latimer, a poetic and much-maligned younger son of a wealthy financier, falls dangerously ill and develops precognitive and telepathic powers, corrupting the path of his life. His best friend, unbeknownst to him, experiments at the edges of modern science, searching for ways to return life to the dead.
His life becomes a waking nightmare of unwanted knowledge, made bearable only by his obsession with his brother's fiancée, Bertha Grant-the one person whose mind remains closed to him, but whose future he foresees as a wife that holds him in contempt and hatred.
When Latimer's friend, the brilliant physician Charles Meunier, arrives with a daring experiment to restore life to the dead, the final veil is torn away in a scene of tragic revelation.
A taut, gothic novella that trades Eliot's celebrated realism for mesmerism, clairvoyance, and the limits of scientific ambition.
