Wilkie Collins

The first modern detective story, The Woman in White is a thrilling mystery that continues to shock even today. Debuting the archetypical elements of the genre, including mysterious apparitions, illegitimacy, mistaken identities, unreliable narrators, drugs, and crimes of passion, this intricate novel presents a thrilling quest for the truth and love. This Penguin Hardcover classic features cover art of light blue birds over a dark navy blue cloth cover.

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Generally considered the first English sensation novel, The Woman in White features the remarkable heroine Marian Halcombe and her sleuthing partner, drawing master Walter Hartright, pitted against the diabolical team of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. A gripping tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity, Collins's psychological thriller has never been out of print in the 140 years since its publication.

Wilkie Collins' classic is considered the very first English detective novel. Given a large diamond on her 18th birthday, it sets off a string of bad luck for Rachel Verrinder. Stolen that very night, suspicion falls on a number of people-until a gifted amateur discovers what the local constables could not. 438 pages, softcover.

T. S. Eliot famously described The Moonstone as the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels, but as Sandra Kemp discusses in her Introduction, it offers many other facets, which reveal Collins's sensibilities as untypical of his era. His women and servants--like the luckless Rosanna--are trated as individuals capable of anger and passion. He unmasks a restrictive society in his depiction of sexual and imperial domination. Finally through his manipulation of the narrative itself, facts, identities and memory become question marks. With constantly shifting perspectives, the marvellously intricate mystery of the Moonstone unfolds.

The Moonstone was published in 1868 and concerns a huge yellow diamond that was once stolen from an Indian shrine. Rachel Verrinder receives the stone as a gift and does not realize that it has been passed on to her as a sinister form of revenge by John Herncastle who acquired the moonstone by means of murder and theft. The jewel seems to bring bad luck to all who possess it. The stone then ends up disappearing on the same night it was acquired! The plot thickens as the story goes on to unravel the mystery and unveil the culprit.

Despite the grave misgivings of both their families, Valeria Brinton and Eustace Woodville are married. But before long the new bride begins to suspect a dark secret in her husband's past and when she discovers that he has been living under a false name, she determines to find out why he is concealing his true identity from her. Soon she must endure an even greater shock: the revelation that her husband has been on trial for poisoning his first wife. Convinced of his innocence, Valeria is prepared to do anything to clear her husband's name, and in so doing upturns the conventions of polite nineteenth century society.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

When the elderly Allan Armadale makes a terrible confession on his death-bed, he has little idea of the repercussions to come, for the secret he reveals involves the mysterious Lydia Gwilt: flame-haired temptress, bigamist, laudanum addict and husband-poisoner. Her malicious intrigues fuel the plot of this gripping melodrama: a tale of confused identities, inherited curses, romantic rivalries, espionage, money—and murder. The character of Lydia Gwilt horrified contemporary critics, with one reviewer describing her as "One of the most hardened female villains whose devices and desires have ever blackened fiction." She remains among the most enigmatic and fascinating women in nineteenth-century literature and the dark heart of this most sensational of Victorian "sensation novels."

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance."

Wilkie Collins's investigation of illegitimacy and 'the woman question' in No Name (1862) compels with a wholly different order of suspense from that of The Woman in White or The Moonstone. For its family secret - the Vanstone daughters' illegitimacy, their consequent disinheritance and fall from social grace - is revealed early on, and as Magdalen Vanstone struggles to reclaim her identity, the plot uncovers many a moral, social and legal skeleton in the cupboards of Victorian society. Mercurial and unscrupulous, Magdalen is Wilkie Collins's most exhilarating heroine, one of the rare subversives in Victorian fiction and a woman dazzlingly versatile in her powers of self-transformation. Through her, with great comic vigour, No Name exposes how social identity is constructed, and how it can be dismantled, buried, borrowed or invented.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.