No Name Wilkie Collins – Magdalen and her sister Norah, beloved daughters of Mr and Mrs Vanstone, find themselves the victims of a catastrophic oversight. Their father has neglected to change his will, and when the girls are suddenly orphaned, their inheritance goes to their uncle. Now penniless, the conventional Norah takes up a position as a governess, but the defiant and tempestuous Magdalen cannot accept the loss of what is rightfully hers and decides to do whatever she can to win it back. With the help of cunning Captain Wragge, she concocts a scheme that involves disguise, deceit and astonishing self-transformation. In this compelling, labyrinthine story Wilkie Collins brilliantly demonstrates the gap between justice and the law, and in the subversive Magdalen he portrays one of the most exhilarating heroines of Victorian fiction.
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A close friend of Charles Dickens from their meeting in March 1851 until Dickens‘ death in June 1870, William Wilkie Collins was one of the best known, best loved, and, for a time, best paid of Victorian fiction writers. But after his death, his reputation declined as Dickens‘ bloomed.Now, Collins is being given more critical and popular attention than he has received for 50 years. Most of his books are in print, and all are now in e-text. He is studied widely; new film, television, and radio versions of some of his books have been made; and all of his letters have been published. However, there is still much to be discovered about this superstar of Victorian fiction.Born in Marylebone, London in 1824, Collins‘ family enrolled him at the Maida Hill Academy in 1835, but then took him to France and Italy with them between 1836 and 1838. Returning to England, Collins attended Cole’s boarding school, and completed his education in 1841, after which he was apprenticed to the tea merchants Antrobus & Co. in the Strand.In 1846, Collins became a law student at Lincoln’s Inn, and was called to the bar in 1851, although he never practised. It was in 1848, a year after the death of his father, that he published his first book, ‚The Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A‘., to good reviews.The 1860s saw Collins‘ creative high-point, and it was during this decade that he achieved fame and critical acclaim, with his four major novels, ‚The Woman in White‘ (1860), ‚No Name‘ (1862), ‚Armadale‘ (1866) and ‚The Moonstone‘ (1868). ‚The Moonstone‘, is seen by many as the first true detective novel T. S. Eliot called it ‚the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels …‘ in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe.
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