The Moonstone
Autor Wilkie Collinsen Limba Engleză Paperback
"'The first detective novel in the English language'"
The Moonstone
A Romance
by Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century British epistolary novel, generally considered the first detective novel in the English language. The story was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round. The Moonstone and The Woman in White are considered Wilkie Collins' best novels. Besides creating many of the ground rules of the detective novel, The Moonstone also reflected Collins' enlightened social attitudes in his treatment of the servants in the novel. Collins adapted The Moonstone for the stage in 1877, but the production was performed for only two months.
Colonel Herncastle, an unpleasant former soldier, brings the Moonstone back with him from India where he acquired it by theft and murder during the Siege of Seringapatam. Angry at his family, who shun him, he leaves it in his will as a birthday gift to his niece Rachel, thus exposing her to attack by the stone's hereditary guardians, who, legend says, will stop at nothing to retrieve it.
Rachel wears the stone to her birthday party, but that night it disappears from her room. Suspicion falls on three Indian jugglers who have been near the house; on Rosanna Spearman, a maidservant who begins to act oddly and who then drowns herself in a local quicksand; and on Rachel herself, who also behaves suspiciously and is suddenly furious with Franklin Blake, with whom she has previously appeared to be enamoured, when he directs attempts to find it. Despite the efforts of Sergeant Cuff, a renowned detective, the house party ends with the mystery unsolved, and the protagonists disperse.
During the ensuing year there are hints that the diamond was removed from the house and may be in a London bank vault, having been pledged as surety to a moneylender. The Indian jugglers are still nearby, watching and waiting. Rachel's grief and isolation increase, especially after her mother dies, and she first accepts and then rejects a marriage proposal from her cousin Godfrey Ablewhite, a philanthropist who was also present at the birthday dinner and whose father owns the bank near Rachel's old family home. Finally Franklin Blake returns from travelling abroad and determines to solve the mystery. He first discovers that Rosanna Spearman's behaviour was due to her having fallen in love with himself. She found evidence (a paint smear on his nightclothes) that convinced her that he was the thief and concealed it to save him, confusing the trail of evidence and throwing suspicion on herself. In despair at her inability to make him acknowledge her despite all she had done for him, she committed suicide, leaving behind the smeared gown and a letter he did not receive at the time because of his hasty departure abroad.
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 1523701897
Pagini: 334
Dimensiuni: 216 x 280 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.78 kg
Editura: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Descriere
Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves.One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins's novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that grows imaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.
Notă biografică
Recenzii
Collins’s story revolves around a diamond stolen from a Hindu holy place. On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder receives the diamond, but by the following morning the stone has been stolen again. As the story unravels through multiple eyewitness accounts, the elderly Sergeant Cuff—with a face “sharp as a hatchet”—looks for the culprit.
One of Collins’s best-loved novels, with an exciting plot moved along by deftly-drawn characters and elegant pacing, The Moonstone was also turned into a play by Collins; the play appears as an appendix to this edition.
“This superbly edited and richly documented edition of what T.S. Eliot described as ‘the first and greatest of English detective novels’ is the definitive and indispensible edition of The Moonstone.” — William Baker, Northern Illinois University
“The Moonstone, one of Wilkie Collins’s most popular and successful novels, has never been out of print since its first publication in 1868. Is another edition needed? The answer, in the case of Professor Farmer’s scholarly and impeccably edited text, must be a resounding yes. Invaluable for his survey of past and present reactions to the story, and for his own insights, the edition also includes historical and background material and a well-chosen collection of relevant contemporary documents—always an important feature of Broadview Literary Texts. This Moonstone will surely prove another winner for Broadview’s list.” — Catherine Peters, author of The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins
“Steve Farmer’s Broadview edition will undoubtedly become the definitive edition of The Moonstone. [It] deserves a five star rating.” — The Wilkie Collins Society Journal
“Here is a book which anyone with an interest in either Collins or Victorian literature in general will want to buy. The chief reason for this is Broadview’s exceptionally generous editorial policy in its series of Literary Texts, and the very good use that Steve Farmer has made of this generosity. In this edition, for a reasonable price, we are given not only a beautifully printed and error-free annotated text of the novel, but also a full introduction and over 150 pages of appendices. … This is the first time that Collins’ dramatic adaptation of the novel has been reprinted and this text alone is well worth the price of the book.” — Adrian J. Pinnington, Waseda University, Wilkie Collins Society Journal
Cuprins
Introduction
William Wilkie Collins: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
The Moonstone
Appendix A: Early Reviews of The Moonstone
- Geraldine Jewsbury, The Athenaeum (July 25, 1868)
- The Spectator (July 25, 1868)
- Nation (September 17, 1868)
- The Times (October 3, 1868)
- Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (October 1868)
- Lippincott’s Magazine (December 1868)
- The Times (July 3, 1860 to October 2, 1865)
- The Sommerset and Wilts Journal (July 21, 1860)
- The Times (July 13, 1861 to July 26, 1861)
- “A Sermon for Sepoys.” From Charles Dickens’s Household Words: A Weekly Journal (February 27, 1858)
Appendix F: The Moonstone (the Play)
Appendix G: Reviews of the Olympic Theatre Performance of Collins’s The Moonstone
- The Times (September 21, 1877)
- The Illustrated London News (September 22, 1877)
- The Athenaeum (September 22, 1877)
- The Spirit of the Times, New York (October 6, 1877)
Textul de pe ultima copertă
But someone knows the secret of the Moonstone and will go to desperate measures to retrieve it. When it goes missing later that night, suspicions are raised and accusations fly. Could it be a trio of mysterious Indian jugglers seen near the house? Or a love-struck housemaid suddely behaving strangely? And there is Rachel herself, who becomes furious when her paramour, Franklin Blake, directs attempts to find it.
As divergent accounts reveal more details, the diamond's recovery is complicated by unexpected twists and turns. Sifting through a compelling list of suspects, the indomitable Sergeant Cuff must find the truth about the Moonstone and its mysterious disappearance.