WILKIE COLLINS THE COMPLETE WORKS (Authoritative Nook Edition)

WORLDWIDE BESTSELLER [Over 10 Million Books Sold] Includes All Major Works by Wilkie Collins The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale, No Name and Books Co-Written by CHARLES DICKENS


Many of Collins's most famous works were the precursors to the detective and suspense fiction genre of today. However, Collins also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women and on the social and domestic issues of his time. For example, his 1854 Hide and Seek contained one of the first portrayals of a deaf character in English literature. As did many writers of his time, Collins published most of his novels as serials in magazines such as Dickens's All the Year Round and was known as a master of the form, creating just the right degree of suspense to keep his audience reading from week to week. Sales of All The Year Round increased when The Woman in White followed A Tale of Two Cities.

Collins enjoyed ten years of great success following publication of The Woman in White in 1859. His next novel, No Name combined social commentary – the absurdity of the law as it applied to children of unmarried parents (see Illegitimacy in fiction) – with a densely plotted revenge thriller. Armadale, the first and only of Collins's major novels of the 1860s to be serialised in a magazine other than All the Year Round, provoked strong criticism, generally centred upon its transgressive villainess Lydia Gwilt; and provoked in part by Collins's typically confrontational preface. The novel was simultaneously a financial coup for its author and a comparative commercial failure: the sum paid by Cornhill for the serialisation rights was exceptional, eclipsing by a substantial margin the prices paid for the vast majority of similar novels, yet the novel failed to recoup its publisher's investment. The Moonstone, published in 1868, and the last novel of what is generally regarded as the most successful decade of its author's career, was, despite a somewhat cool reception from both Dickens and the critics, a significant return to form and reestablished the market value of an author whose success in the competitive Victorian literary marketplace had been gradually waning in the wake of his first "masterpiece". Viewed by many to represent the advent of the detective story within the tradition of the English novel, The Moonstone remains one of Collins's most critically acclaimed productions, identified by T. S. Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels...in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe", and Dorothy L. Sayers referred to it as "probably the very finest detective story ever written"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Antonina or, The Fall of Rome
Basil

Hide and Seek
The Dead Secret

Rogue's Life
The Woman in White

No Name
The First Scene.

Armadale
The Moonstone

The Moonstone
Sixth Narrative Contributed by Sergeant Cuff

Man and Wife
Man and Wife

Poor Miss Finch
The New Magdalen

The Law and the Lady
The Two Destinies

My Lady's Money
The Haunted Hotel

The Fallen Leaves
Jezebel's Daughter

The Black Robe
Heart and Science: a story of the present time

II. To Readers in Particular.
I Say No

The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story
The Guilty River

The Legacy of Cain
Blind Love

Mr Wray's Cash Box
After Dark

The Queen of Hearts
Little Novels

Volpurno or The Student
The Twin Sisters

A Passage in the Life of Perugino Potts
A Terribly Strange Bed.

Nine O'Clock!
Gabriel’s Marriage

A Stolen Letter.
Sister Rose.

The Yellow Mask.
Brother Griffith’s Story of Mad Monkton

Brother Morgan’s Story of The Dream-Woman.
The Lady of Glenwith Grange.

A Fair Penitent
Brother Owen’s Story of The Siege of the Black Cottage.

Brother Morgan’s Story of The Dead Hand
Brother Griffith’s Story of The Family Secret.

Brother Griffith’s Story of A Plot in Private Life.
Brother Morgan’s Story of Fauntleroy.

Brother Griffith’s Story of The Biter Bit.
The Poisoned Meal

Blow Up with the Brig!
Brother Owen’s Story of The Parson’s Scruple.

Memoirs of an Adopted Son
The Cauldron of Oil

The Fatal Cradle
Miss or Mrs?

The Dead Alive
The Frozen Deep

Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman.
Mr. Captain and the Nymph.

Mr. Captain and the Nymph.
Miss Bertha and the Yankee.

Mr. Percy and the Prophet.
Miss Mina and the Groom

Mr. Marmaduke and the Minister.
Mrs. Zant and the Ghost.

The Devil’s Spectacles

And More!