by Wilkie Collins A woman dies in childbirth, leaving a mysterious letter for her husband in the hands of her maid. The first part of the story established a mystery; what was in the letter? Why is the maid reluctant to give it to the husband as instructed? I found myself quickly caught up and rea...
This novella by Collins was first published in 1874 in the collection "The Frozen Deep and other stories" under the title "John Jago's Ghost; or The Dead Alive". Based on a real early 19th-century case, it is set in the US, and the solution to the mysterious disappearance/murder of John Jago is fair...
Given his own socially unconventional attitudes (he had a well-documented disdain for the institution of marriage), I think it's unlikely that the plot of this novel - ostensibly a cautionary tale about choosing the rascal over the upright man for a husband - was anything more than a convenient trop...
I found this story of a nerve-stricken man and his shattered marriage to be less entertaining than Collins' usual, mainly because it relies on an uncomfortable strain of anti-Catholicism - and associated mercenary motives - for its villain, Father Benwell, who is just about as stereotypical a Jesuit...
An early novel by Collins (though the introduction, in the Kindle version I read, indicated that this was a later edition that Collins had revised). It's also a shortish novel by Collins standards, so once the action gets going, it zips along at a fair pace. The opening chapters, admittedly, are slo...
Well, the third week really hit my bingo experience out of the ballpark this year -- and not only because it finished with my first completed bingo; that was actually just the icing on the cake. But it included no less than three absolutely knock-out fabulous books, plus a fourth that was almost as...
The Lady Detectives is a compilation of four full cast radio dramatizations of early Golden Age mysteries focusing on women detectives; not only pioneering works of detective fiction as such but works that give their women protagonists much greater agency than the majority of their female contempora...
This is a fine old melodrama. It's really much too long and complicated to be easily adapted to a play (although Collins did so, apparently, to protect his rights). But there is decidedly something of the Victorian theatre in the easily contrasted main male characters, the wild coincidences, the spe...
This is Wilkie Collins' first published novel, and it definitely shows. I am generally a fan of the expansiveness of Victorian prose, and of the tendency of Victorian narrators to break the fourth wall and address the reader directly. I find both things charming. But "discursive" doesn't begin to co...
(Original Review, 1981-01-28)The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her wa...
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