Mad Monkton is a bizarre ghost story. It is said that a strain of hereditary madness blights the Monkton family, heirs to the huge domain of Wincot Abbey. Rumours in the neighbourhood are that Alfred, the youngest scion, has inherited this insanity. His odd behaviour certainly points that way. Alfred is engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Ada Elmslie. But at the very moment when various obstacles to the match are overcome, Alfred suddenly departs for Italy, seeking the corpse of his disreputable uncle, who is believed to have been killed in a duel. What could have driven Alfred to do this?
A pioneer of detective fiction, Wilkie Collins produced masterpieces like ‘The Woman in White’ and ‘The Moonstone’, establishing himself as the master of sensation fiction. Collins perfected the mystery story, producing countless classics that would have a lasting impact on the history of the novel. For the first time in publishing history, this comprehensive eBook presents Collins’ complete works, with numerous illustrations, many rare texts, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 5) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Collins’ life and works * Concise introductions to the novels and other texts * ALL 24 novels, with individual contents tables * Includes rare novels often missed out of collections * Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original Victorian texts * Excellent formatting of the texts * Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the short stories * Rare tales from periodicals and magazines, appearing here for the first time in digital publishing * Easily locate the short stories you want to read * Includes Collins’ rare plays – available in no other collection * Includes Collins’ non-fiction – spend hours exploring the author’s rare magazine essays and articles * Special biographical section, with essays and biographical pieces evaluating Collins’ literary and private life * Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles CONTENTS: The Novels ANTONINA BASIL HIDE AND SEEK A ROGUE’S LIFE THE DEAD SECRET THE WOMAN IN WHITE NO NAME ARMADALE THE MOONSTONE MAN AND WIFE POOR MISS FINCH THE NEW MAGDALEN THE LAW AND THE LADY THE TWO DESTINIES THE HAUNTED HOTEL THE FALLEN LEAVES JEZEBEL’S DAUGHTER THE BLACK ROBE HEART AND SCIENCE “I SAY NO” THE EVIL GENIUS THE GUILTY RIVER THE LEGACY OF CAIN BLIND LOVE The Short Story Collections AFTER DARK THE QUEEN OF HEARTS MISS OR MRS.? AND OTHER STORIES IN OUTLINE THE FROZEN DEEP AND OTHER STORIES LITTLE NOVELS MISCELLANEOUS SHORT STORIES The Short Stories LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER The Plays THE FROZEN DEEP NO THOROUGHFARE BLACK AND WHITE NO NAME THE WOMAN IN WHITE THE NEW MAGDALEN MISS GWILT THE MOONSTONE The Non-Fiction MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF WILLIAM COLLINS ESQ, RA RAMBLES BEYOND RAILWAYS MY MISCELLANIES MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS AND ARTICLES The Biographies WILKIE COLLINS’ CHARMS by Olive Logan MEN OF MARK: W. WILKIE COLLINS by Edmund Yates WILKIE COLLINS by William Teignmouth Shore Extracts from ‘MEMORIES OF HALF A CENTURY’ by Rudolph Chambers Lehmann Extracts from ‘LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS’ by John Forster Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles or to purchase this eBook as a Parts Edition of individual eBooks
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This book examines how Wilkie Collins’s interest in medical matters developed in his writing through exploration of his revisions of the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel from his first sensation novels to his last novels of the 1880s. Throughout his career, Collins made changes in the prototypical Gothic scenario. The aristocratic villains, victimized maidens and medieval castles of classic Gothic tales were reworked and adapted to thrill his Victorian readership. With the advances of neuroscience and the development of criminology as a significant backdrop to most of his novels, Collins drew upon contemporary anxieties and increasingly used the medical to propel his criminal plots. While the prototypical castles were turned into modern medical institutions, his heroines no longer feared ghosts but the scientist’s knife. This study hence underlines the way in which Collins’s Gothic revisions increasingly tackled medical questions, using the medical terrain to capitalize on the readers’ fears. It also demonstrates how Wilkie Collins’s fiction reworks Gothic themes and presents them through the prism of contemporary scientific, medical and psychological discourses, from debates revolving around mental physiology to those dealing with heredity and transmission. The book’s structure is chronological covering a selection of texts in each chapter, with a balance between discussion of the more canonical of Collins’s texts such as The Woman in White, The Moonstone and Armadale and some of his more neglected writings.
In this major biography, Catherine Peters explores the complicated life of Wilkie Collins, the greatest of the Victorian "Sensation" novelists and author of the famous Woman in White and The Moonstone. An intimate of Dickens and of the Pre-Raphaelites Holman Hunt and Millais, Collins was called the "king of inventors" by his publisher. On the surface, he was charming, unpretentious, and extremely good company, beloved by men and women. Beneath this façade, however, he was a complex and haunted man, addicted to laudanum, and his powerful, often violent novels revealed a dark side of Victorian life. He supported two common-law wives and their children, and as Peters shows, he provoked scandal by refusing to cloak his complicated love affairs in the customary hypocritical pretense of the period. Having discovered a hitherto unknown autobiography by Wilkie Collins's mother, Peters draws on this document and on thousands of Collins's unpublished letters to create this provocative picture of his life and times. She describes in detail the saga of his exhausting struggle for better copyright protection for authors, especially for English authors in the United States. She has also studied the manuscripts of his novels, plays, and stories, including those which he did not complete, finding that some of his neglected novels turn out to be much more interesting than most readers realize today. This edition of the book has been supplemented to include an appendix describing Collins's "Tahitian" novel. Written when he was twenty, the manuscript of this work, Ioláni, was thought to have disappeared, but it has recently been rediscovered and sold to a private collector. For any Collins enthusiast, or for anyone interested in the literary history of the Victorian period, The King of Inventors provides a vivid account of Collins's unusual personal life in the context of his literary and artistic friendships and of newly revealed facts about the two women with whom he shared his "double life." Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
