Wilkie Collins
Список книг автора Wilkie CollinsThe Evil Genius
Whether society should recognize a couple who, after being divorced, become reconciled, agree to forget their past difficulties and re-marry, is the question Mr. Collins tries to solve. The "evil genius "who makes all the mischief is the mother-in-law, who feels it is her duty to open her daughter's eyes to her husband's admiration for the governess. The governess' history takes up a good space in the opening chapters, and is full of interest. Her father is tried and found guilty of deliberately causing the loss of his ship in order to gain possession of a large package of diamonds. The trial, the unsuccessful attempt to find the stolen diamonds, the girl's helpless condition, and so on are all told with the detail Mr. Collins has made specially his own. There is much dramatic power shown in the narrative.
Little Novels
Wilkie Collins' 'Little Novels' is a collection of ingenious stories, told with some of the marvellous skill that made the author of The Woman in White famous. Villany is frustrated by devious ways, and a mind must be much preoccupied indeed that cannot for a time lose itself in Mr. Collins' ingenious combinations. Mr. Collins does not favor us with any wicked monk, and there is little of that coarseness which intrudes into several of his earlier stories. All over a fantastic read.
The Legacy of Cain
Wilkie Collins' last-but-one novel was originally published in 1889. The Reverend Abel Gracedieu raises two daughters. One of them was adopted seventeen years before the story starts because her mother was executed for murdering her husband. The main question of the plot is whether this adoption will not end in a very bad away because the daughter is allegedly as evil and wicked as her mother ….
My Miscellanies
The author of 'The Woman in White' and of 'No Name' has had reprinted and published a collection of articles contributed by him to Household Words, and perhaps to other periodicals. The two papers which will attract most attention are probably those entitled respectively, «To Think, or Be Thought For,» and «Dramatic Grub-street,» inasmuch as upon their first appearance they provoked both private and public remonstrance, and they are now reprinted because Mr. Collins has seen a reason to abandon the convictions the expression of which called down upon him the aforesaid remonstrances. It is undoubted that this publication did not add much to the author's brilliant fame, but it is useful as a sort of meter by which one may measure his prodigious growth. This edition includes both original volumes.
No Name
The special charm of 'No Name' is the uncertainty in which the reader is kept. The most experienced of novel-readers is unable to predict whether Magdalen succeeds in her scheme, or marries Capt. Kirke, or retires from the scene to die, baffled and broken-hearted. Each crisis in the progress of the story takes the public by surprise. The death of the elder Vanstone, the marriage of Magdalen with his son, the trust by which Noel Vanstone prolongs the contest, even after his decease —to quote the word which he himself preferred to the vulgar one of 'death' – are all startling surprises, unpredicted and unforeseen Much higher praise cannot be given. There is, too, both about Capt. Wragge and Old Mazey, a dry, delicate humour, for which before one should hardly have given Mr. Collins credit. 'No Name' has added to the author's fame and many readers have derived so much pleasure in reading it, that it is hard to speak ungratefully of this book. Still it is fair to warn the novel-reading public that, if they want really to enjoy the great sensation novel, they should read it at the rate of not more than a chapter a day.
The Queen of Hearts
Mr. Wilkie Collins can tell a story well, and he has an ingenious knack of stringing stories together. After Dark consisted of a series of stories, and admirable they were, and 'The Queen of Hearts' is a work of the same description. The author lives in the region of fiction; but he does not aim at the higher objects contemplated by the more gifted writers of his class. He does not affect to be profound, philosophical, or didactic. His great object is so to write as to sustain interest and to amuse. But, though he does not aim at anything beyond that, thanks to his sympathies with many of the better qualities of human nature, he achieves something much higher.
The Woman in White
This extraordinary work ranks among the foremost purely melodramatic or sensation novels of modern times. Mr. Collins has thrown a force and power into this story, of which the reader has only seen intimations in his former works. After opening the narrative with a cheerful sketch of Professor Pesea, an Italian Refugee, combining in his small person all the pleasant traits of his nation, the author at once begins his work, and in a few sentences throws a weird and mystic glow over the story, which we feel to deepen and extend, until the disclosure of the plot by the discovery of the register and subsequent death of Sir Percival Glyde. This effort is all the more remarkable when we examine the simplicity of the means employed, which consist of a series of Runic repetitions so strongly exemplified in Edgar Poe's compositions. The misfortune which must attach to all novels of the terrific school, is, that the termination of necessity explains that which the imagination has been before allowed to dwell upon, and a feeling of disappointment must succeed the denouement however horrible that may be. This, Mr. Collins has avoided as far as practicable, in withdrawing the attention of the reader from the éclaircissement, by relating a tremendous interview, tremendous from the self-control exercised by both parties, between Hartright and Count Fosca, a villain of entirely new stamp, except in his fondness for pets, in which he resembles, if we remember correctly, one of the Council of Three who, while condemning thousands to the guillotine, would fondle his cat with feminine tenderness. But we will not spoil the plot, plain yet complex, elaborate but not confused. What we can do, however, is to advise those who enjoy the stronger forms of light literature, to lose no time in reading this most interesting novel.
A Rogue's Life
'A Rogue's Life' was published in a magazine some twenty years before it was made into a book. It is a very clever story, and the interest is well sustained throughout. There is just about enough of it, inasmuch as a short tale like this is more interesting than some of the author's longer works, wherein the complicated plots and lengthened mysteries are too apt to weary the reader before his curiosity is satisfied. We cannot help feeling quite an affection for the «Rogue,» perhaps because most of the other characters in the story are as selfish, more wicked, and not so frankly conceited as he is, and have none of his courage, audacity, and cleverness to redeem them. We must all sympathize in his marriage, though it is not celebrated under the most favorable circumstances, – he being liable to the extreme penalty of the law at the time. It seems hard that he should be captured, tried, and sentenced to transportation immediately after securing his wife; but this proves the beginning of his upward career of prosperity and respectability, and we leave him happily settled with Alicia in Australia. We do not wish to destroy the interest of a book which is so dependent on the plot, by telling more of the story, and therefore leave it without further comment to new readers.
The Frozen Deep
The main actor in this play, that was co-written with Mr. Charles Dickens, is Richard Wardour, a man of violent passions, who has been supplanted in the affections of the woman to whom he was ardently attached. He discovers his successful rival in a comrade in an arctic expedition. Eager, mad for revenge, he determines to kill him. They go forth together in the rear of a party dispatched in search of succor, Richard Wardour with murder in his thoughts, Frank Aldersley unsuspecting, confiding. Companionship in suffering restores the heart of humanity to Richard Wardour. Instead of being the destroyer of his rival, he becomes his savior.
The Ostler
'The Ostler" was originally published in 1855 as a short story, which later became the foundation for the much longer story 'The Dream Woman.' It is one of Wilkie Collins' first supernatural stories, revolving around the forty-year-old Isaac Scatchard, who has a very strange dream of a young woman – or wasn't it a dream, but a ghost? Seven years later he even gets more lost when he encounters a woman who looks very much like his strange dream creature ….