Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
1 Introduction: Two Secrets—or One?
Phase One: What Eliot Saw, What Spencer Said
2 “The Lifted Veil,” A: George Eliot Stolen!
3 “The Lifted Veil,” B: Revenge by Diagnosis
4 A Fitful Reader
5 The Dagger Sheathed, Partly
Phase Two: What the Philosopher Wrote (with a Friend’s
Rejoinder)
6 Electricity and the Man
7 The Mystery of the Two Rooms
8 Enter Hughlings-Jackson
9 A Good Strong Terrible Vision
Phase Three: What the Doctor Heard
10 Lewes the Fixer
11 Who Was Hughlings-Jackson’s “Educated Patient”?
12 Ghost Stories
Phase Four: The Exchange of Prisoners
13 The Man between the Fits
14 Eliot Does Mischief (Again)
15 Life after the Georges
16 Conclusion: The Brain is Not the Mind
Appendix 1: Many Snapshots, One Secretive Patient
Appendix 2: Did Spencer Have Autosomal Dominant Partial
Epilepsy
with Auditory Features?
Notes
Acknowledgments
List of Works Cited
Index
Martin N. Raitiere is a practitioner of general adult psychiatry in Portland, Oregon.
In this groundbreaking work, Raitiere (a practicing physician with
a PhD in English literature) argues that the eminent Victorian
philosopher Herbert Spencer suffered from a debilitating
psychiatric illness but that his condition was known only to a few.
This secret was betrayed in coded fashion by one of his closest
friends, George Eliot, in her novella The Lifted Veil and to some
extent in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Eliot was advised and
counseled by her partner, George Henry Lewes, "who had developed a
serious interest in neuropsychiatric illness" partly through his
friendship with Spencer. The fourth person in Raitiere's account,
Hughlings-Jackson, was a brilliant neurologist. Raitiere provides a
detailed account of the work of all four, arguing that "Spencer's
illness functions as the nidus round which George Eliot, Lewes, and
Hughlings-Jackson organized certain of their key works." Providing
a thorough examination of the writings of each and areas of their
work hitherto neglected or ignored, the book is truly
interdisciplinary and one of the most fascinating (albeit dense)
studies to emerge for many decades on the interconnections between
Victorian literature, psychology, and allied areas. Summing Up:
Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty;
general readers.
*CHOICE*
Beautifully written, based in exhaustive research, and like a
detective story in its pace and sequence of revealed discovery,
this study reveals that the famous 19th-century philosopher Herbert
Spencer suffered from a specific neurological disorder, one that
was described by his doctor John Hughlings-Jackson only in the
privacy of his medical notes. Raitiere (he earned a PhD in English
before going on to study and practice psychiatry and neuroscience)
shows how Spencer's condition was perceived by friends and
acquaintances, most notably by the novelist George Eliot, who
incorporates her close relationship with him into fiction. This is
a fascinating and substantial work, one that will be of interest to
the general reader as well as specialists in 19th-century
literature, philosophy, and neuroscience.
*Book News, Inc.*
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