Book #6 is actually two short novellas in one paperback, George Eliot's The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob. The former is an Edgar Allan Poe meets Mary Shelley-style Gothic drama with a gorey blood transfusion scene and a "hero," Latimer, who faints at the drop of the hat and has a creepy supernatural ability to see into the future. The latter is a morality tale involving greed and copious amounts of sugar. 
From The Lifted Veil:
The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel, made each day in her presence a delicious torment. There was one deliberate act of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me. When we were at Vienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she was very fond of ornaments, we all took the opportunity of the splendid jewellers' shops in that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday present of jewellery. Mine, naturally, was the least expensive; it was an opal ring--the opal was my favourite stone, because it seems to blush and turn pale as if it had a soul. I told Bertha so when I gave it her, and said that it was an emblem of the poetic nature, changing with the changing light of heaven and of woman's eyes. In the evening she appeared elegantly dressed, and wearing conspicuously all the birthday presents except mine. I looked eagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal. I had no opportunity of noticing this to her during the evening; but the next day, when I found her seated near the window alone, after breakfast, I said, "You scorn to wear my poor opal. I should have remembered that you despised poetic natures, and should have given you coral, or turquoise, or some other opaque unresponsive stone." "Do I despise it?" she answered, taking hold of a delicate gold chain which she always wore round her neck and drawing out the end from her bosom with my ring hanging to it; "it hurts me a little, I can tell you," she said, with her usual dubious smile, "to wear it in that secret place; and since your poetical nature is so stupid as to prefer a more public position, I shall not endure the pain any longer." (Read The Lifted Veil in its entirety, here.)
Image: Performing the Operation of the Transfusion of Blood at the Hospital of Pity, Paris, France
From the Archives: Poetic Tribute
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