The Dead Secret

by Wilkie Collins

Overview

Collins's puzzle-romance. A secret has all but ruined the life of young Sarah Leeson; it must be uncovered, but when it is, there is a desastrous revelation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781023330022
Publisher:	Anson Street Press
Publication date:	03/29/2025
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English novelist and playwright. Born in London, Collins was raised in England, Italy, and France by William Collins, a renowned landscape painter, and his wife Harriet Geddes. After working for a short time as a tea merchant, he published Antonina (1850), his literary debut. He quickly became known as a leading author of sensation novels, a popular genre now recognized as a forerunner to detective fiction. Encouraged on by the success of his early work, Collins made a name for himself on the London literary scene. He soon befriended Charles Dickens, forming a strong bond grounded in friendship and mentorship that would last several decades. His novels The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868) are considered pioneering examples of mystery and detective fiction, and enabled Collins to become financially secure. Toward the end of the 1860s, at the height of his career, Collins began to suffer from numerous illnesses, including gout and opium addiction, which contributed to his decline as a writer. Beyond his literary work, Collins is seen as an early advocate for marriage reform, criticizing the institution and living a radically open romantic lifestyle.

Date of Birth:

December 8, 1824

Date of Death:

September 23, 1889

Place of Birth:

London, England

Place of Death:

London, England

Education:

Studied law at Lincoln¿s Inn, London

Editorial Reviews

Master Victorian entertainer Collins's fourth novel, and the first to be serialized in weekly installments, dates from 1857. It begins at Porthgenna Tower, the Cornish estate of Captain Treverton, at the deathbed of the Captain's wife. Before she dies, she insists on having her trusted maid, Sarah Leeson, write her husband a letter giving an account of a secret only the two women share, and swear, on pain of haunting, not to destroy the letter or to take it away from Porthgenna herself. Scrupulously following her mistress's bidding, Sarah hides the letter in an unused room of the Tower, leaves a note telling Treverton that his wife confided a secret to her she is afraid to reveal to him—and then vanishes from Cornwall, leaving the house, which Treverton has come to hate, to be abandoned, then purchased by a family whose blind son, Leonard Frankland, marries the Captain's daughter Rosamond years later when the real complications get underway. Modern readers, who will have no trouble figuring out the dead secret long before the characters do, are more likely to be engaged by the Dickensian minor characters, the hints of long-dormant intrigue, the heavy-breathing melodrama Collins would bring to perfection only three years later in The Woman in White, and, almost as an afterthought, the implied portrait of a whole social order few novelists in our more knowing time would ever attempt.

Kirkus Reviews