Author

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins
  • Two tales from the golden age of supernatural fiction

    The Haunted House at Latchford by Mrs. J. H. Riddell

    Mrs. J. H. Riddell excelled at blending the realistic and supernatural elements in her stories. In Essex she found the right dreary setting for The Haunted House at Latchford, “where beyond the fated house and ruined garden lay the belt of pine trees and the lake of the dismal swamp, which had furnished Crow Hall with no less than two tragedies.”

    The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins

    Like Edgar Allan Poe before him and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after, Wilkie Collins shifted easily from rational domains to the “superrational.” The Haunted Hotel exhibits the same relentless pace and narrative power, the same attention to plot and backdrop detail that distinguish The Moonstone and The Woman in White, along with the obsession with destiny and the willful struggle against it. Collins’s much-loved Venice provides the scenery and fatal beauty, the grim waterways and palaces the author will haunt with mysterious women, grotesques, and bloody conspiracies.

  • George and Mary were childhood friends. But then George’s father discovers his thirteen-year-old son feels true passion for his bailiff’s daughter. Determined to end the affair, George’s father sacks the bailiff and takes his son to America. Years later George returns to his native Suffolk to trace his lost love. Though she has long gone, George is determined to find Mary at any cost.

  • When Walter Hartright encounters a solitary, terrified, beautiful woman dressed in white on a moonlit night in London, he feels impelled to solve the mystery of her distress. Full of secrets, locked rooms, lost memories, and surprise revelations, The Woman in White features heroine Marian Halcombe and drawing-master Walter Hartright as sleuthing partners pitted against the diabolical Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde.

    This gothic psychological thriller, a mesmerizing tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity, has gripped the imaginations of readers since its first publication in 1860. The breathtaking tension of Collins’ narrative created a new literary genre of suspense fiction, which profoundly shaped the course of English popular writing.

  • When the Countess Narona meets Agnes Lockwood, the woman jilted by her fiancé, she feels a great sense of foreboding. After Countess Narona’s marriage, she moves with her husband, Lord Montbarry, to Venice. There, disowned by his family, the lord apparently becomes a recluse and falls fatally ill. As much as Agnes tries to forget the episode of her broken engagement, her fate and that of the countess seem to be inextricably woven. Both are relentlessly drawn to the Palace Hotel in Venice for a final and dramatic encounter in the room where more than past emotions resurface to haunt them.

    Loosely based on a case from the annals of French crime, the scene, scenery, players, conflicts, and especially the horror of this mystery come through the invention of one of our classic novelists.

  • This delightful tale of thwarted ambition and forbidden love follows the adventures and fortunes of an endearing young rogue, Frank Softly. Originally appearing serialized in Household Words in 1859, the rogue is one of Collins' most richly comic creations.

    Propelled into society by his ever-hopeful father, Frank is introduced to a variety of professions in order to make his fortune. Not industrious by nature, Frank finds working life a challenge, and by his twenty-fifth birthday, he has failed in medicine, portrait-painting, caricaturing, and even forgery. Disenchanted with life, he despairs of ever finding something to commit to—until he meets Alicia Dulcifer and her inexplicably wealthy father.

    Proffering his own take on picaresque storytelling—and with many a grain of truth for twentysomethings today—this is Wilkie Collins at his entertaining best.