Science, Art, and the Myth of Failure in George Eliot's Picture of Austria

This paper examines the great Victorian novelist George Eliot's (1819–80) picture of Cisleithanian Austria through an exploration of her essays, letters, and diaries; her final novel, the philo-Semitic Daniel Deronda; and her gothic novella The Lifted Veil. It explores her use of Austrian locales as sites for encounter with the Other, where her philosophies of art, science, mythography, and human fellowship converge. I argue that, employing ideas from the philosophy, science, and mythography of her day, Eliot in The Lifted Veil used Austria as a place associated with backwardness and obscurantist mysticism in order to illustrate, through a myth of failure, the necessary connection between art and human fellowship.