This short book, which amazon gives free to kindle owners, was composed by George Elliot (1819-1880). A shy rich man with a weak, sickly, poetical nature expects to die very soon from a heart condition in 1850. He doesn't expect any of his three servants to respond to his bell for help because he understand people and knows that they are involved in their own affairs. He uses these moments alone to tell his life story.
He realized that he had unique abilities when he was young. He had visions of the future, what people will do and say, long before they do or say it. He also had the gift of insight. He could understand people's character and pierce the veil of their faces and false conduct. Yet, he couldn't understand Bertha for many years.
Bertha was a thin and beautiful girl, a year older than he, with whom he fell in love. She could be charming. Yet, she was self-centered, negative, heartless, satirical, sarcastic, opinionated, vain, and loved power, but he saw none of this. He was nineteen and she twenty. She was engaged to his brother who was twenty-six. She admitted to him that she didn't love his brother. But he was in ecstasy with her and saw no faults. He even ignored a vision that he was married to her and she mistreated him. His brother died in an accident and he married Bertha without knowing if she loved him, although she said she did.
After some years of marriage, when his father died, he was suddenly able to see what his wife Bertha truly was, that she despised him. Then life became unbearable, as he foresaw in his vision.
He noticed a strange relationship between Bertha and her servant. Then, when the servant was dying, his friend, a doctor, told him that the servant would expire that night and asked for permission from him to insert blood into her artery after she died to see what happens. She died, the blood was inserted, she came back to life, turned to Bertha, who just entered the room, and yelled at her, "You mean to poison your husband...the poison is in the black cabinet...I got it for you." Then she died again, and he separated from Bertha after dividing his property with her, equally.
Reflecting back at the servant's resurrection, he asks, "Is this what it is to live again...to wake up with our unsatiated thirst upon us, with our unuttered curses rising to our lips, with our muscles ready to act out their half committed sins?"
Can this story be read as a parable, a commentary on marriage, that men are unable to unveil the character of their wives' feelings, even though they can understand other people, that love blinds?
