Collins W.

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter becomes embroiled in the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. The Yellow Mask is a complete mystery novel. The secret of Wilkie Collins’s success is the combination of various genres: the writer-master of intrigue and fascinating plot skillfully combines melodrama, detective and a manners novel in his books, generously flavoring them elements of the Gothic novel. Sister Rose is set against the background of the French Revolution and concerns Louis Trudaine; his sister, Rose, who contracts an unhappy marriage to the aristocratic Charles Danville; and Danville's land-steward, Lomaque, who is indebted to Trudaine's father. Trudaine fulfils a deathbed promise to his mother to protect Rose and arouses Danville's animosity.

The Yellow Mask & Sister Rose

In autumn 1857, Charles Dickens embarked on a sightseeing trip to Cumberland with his friend, the rising star of literature Wilkie Collins. Writing together, they reported their adventures for Dickens’ periodical Household Words, producing a showcase of both long-cherished and entirely novel sides of these wellloved men of letters. Through their fi ctional counterparts, the men relentlessly satirize Dickens’ maniacal energy and Collins’ idleness. The result is an exuberant diary of a journey and a rare insight into one of literature’s most famed and intriguing friendships.

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

The secret of Wilkie Collins’s success is the combination of various genres: the writer-master of intrigue and fascinating plotskillfully combines melodrama, detective and a manners novel in his books, generously fl avoring them elements of the Gothic novel. The Yellow Mask – a complete mystery novel.

The Yellow Mask

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. The Black Robe is an 1881 epistolary novel. In this story of relationships, psychological contortion, and deceit, a priest comes between an impressionable man and the young woman he loves. Collins is best known for originating the genre of the “sensation novel” that is the precursor of the modern suspense and detective novels.

The Black Robe

William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His best-known works are The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868). Collins’s works were classifi ed at the time as «sensation novels», a genre seen nowadays as the precursor to detective and suspense fiction.

The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. The novella The Haunted Hotel is a clever combination of detective and ghost story set in Venice, a city of grim waterways, dark shadows and death. The action takes place in an ancient palazzo converted into a modern hotel that houses a grisly secret. No Thoroughfare is a stage play produced by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name, Walter Wilding, with disastrous consequences in adulthood. After the death of one – now a proprietor of a wine merchant's company – the executors, to right the wrong, are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean – across the Alps in winter. Danger and treachery would prevail were it not for the courage of the heroine, Marguerite, and a faithful company servant.

The Haunted Hotel & No Thoroughfare

William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. The Yellow Mask is a mystery novel. The secret of Wilkie Collins’s success is the combination of various genres: the writer-master of intrigue and fascinating plot skillfully combines melodrama, detective and a manners novel in his books, generously flavoring them elements of the Gothic novel.

The Moonstone, generally recognized as the first detective novel is not only a work of historical importance but also a work that transcends the genre it created, in the artfulness of its plotting, in its compassionate depiction of servants, and in its enlightened resolution of the theme of the British Empire, its crimes and their consequences. Hinging on the theft of an enormous diamond originally stolen from an Indian shrine, this riveting novel features the innovative Sergeant Cuff, the hilarious house steward Gabriel Betteridge, a lovesick housemaid, and a mysterious band of Indian jugglers.

The Moonstone

When the elderly Allan Armadale makes a terrible confession on his death-bed, he has little idea of the repercussions to come, for the secret he reveals involves the mysterious Lydia Gwilt: fl amed-hair temptress, bigamist, laudanum addict and husbandpoisoner. This traditional melodrama also considers the modern theme of the role of women in society.

Armadale III

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. Armadale is a novel by Collins, first published in 1864-66. When the elderly Allan Armadale makes a terrible confession on his death-bed, he has little idea of the repercussions to come, for the secret he reveals involves the mysterious Lydia Gwilt: flamed-hair temptress, bigamist, laudanum addict and husband-poisoner. This traditional melodrama also considers the modern theme of the role of women in society.

Armadale III-V

Armadale II

Armadale IV, V

Armadale I-II

The Moonstone is an epistolary novel, generally considered the first full length detective novel in the English language. Besides creating many of the ground rules of the detective novel, The Moonstone also reflected Collins' enlightened social attitudes, i. e. in his treatment of the servants. In 1877 Collins adapted The Moonstone for the stage, but the production was performed for only two months.

The Moonstone / Лунный камень

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. Hide and Seek is the story about the girl named Mary – they called her Madonna, and she was deaf and dumb and beautiful as a painting by Raphael. All they did know about her identity was that she’d lost her hearing in an accident, and the proprietor of the circus had treated her horribly, and in her cache of secret personal private things, she owned one thing as precious to her as life itself: a bracelet made of brown human hair with the initials MG tied into it.

Hide and Seek

Magdalen Vanstone and Norah - her sister learn the true meaning of social stigma in Victorian England only after the discovery that their parents, whose sudden deaths have left them orphans, were not married at the time of their birth. Disinherited by law and brutally ousted from home, the two young women are left to fend for themselves.

Collins W.

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