Wilkie Collins

The Fallen Leaves by Wilkie Collins

The Dead Alive by Wilkie Collins

Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins

Heart and Science by Wilkie Collins

This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Basil by Wilkie Collins

My Miscellanies, Vol. 2 (of 2) by Wilkie Collins

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices by Wilkie Collins

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.

Today, divorces are a dime a dozen. In the nineteenth century, however, the implosion of a family unit was a much rarer event, and the implications of such an occurrence often spread far beyond the small group of people who were directly involved. Settle in for this juicy domestic drama from Wilkie Collins, friend and protege of Charles Dickens.

Jezebel's Daughter by Wilkie Collins

A romance of the fifth century, in which many of the scenes described in the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' are reset to suit the purpose of the author. Only two historical personages are introduced into the story,– the Emperor Honorius, and Alaric the Goth; and these attain only a secondary importance. Among the historical incidents used are the arrival of the Goths at the gates of Rome, the Famine, the last efforts of the besieged, the Treaty of Peace, the introduction of the Dragon of Brass, and the collection of the ransom. Our heroine Antonina, a very young Roman maiden, flees her father and an amorous patrician neighbor, into the arms of a young, handsome, gentle, sympathetic Goth. This book does not show the intricacy of plot and clever construction of the author's modern society stories; but it is full of action, vivid in color, and sufficiently close to history to convey a dramatic sense of the Rome of Honorius and the closing-in of the barbarians.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfectionssuch as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed worksworldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Rambles Beyond Railways; Or, Notes In Cornwall William Wilkie Collins

More than one charming blind girl, in fiction and in the drama, has preceded “Poor Miss Finch.” But, so far as I know, blindness in these cases has been always exhibited, more or less exclusively, from the ideal and the sentimental point of view. The attempt here made is to appeal to an interest of another kind, by exhibiting blindness as it really is. I have carefully gathered the information necessary to the execution of this purpose from competent authorities of all sorts.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

THE place is France.The time is autumn, in the year eighteen hundred and seventy--the year of the war between France and Germany.The persons are, Captain Arnault, of the French army; Surgeon Surville, of the French ambulance; Surgeon Wetzel, of the German army; Mercy Merrick, attached as nurse to the French ambulance; and Grace Roseberry, a traveling lady on her way to England.

SOON after sunrise, on a cloudy morning in the year 1881, a special messenger disturbed the repose of Dennis Howmore, at his place of residence in the pleasant Irish town of Ardoon. Well acquainted apparently with the way upstairs, the man thumped on a bed-room door, and shouted his message through it: “The master wants you, and mind you don’t keep him waiting.” The person sending this peremptory message was Sir Giles Mountjoy of Ardoon, knight and banker. The person receiving the message was Sir Giles’s head clerk. As a matter of course, Dennis Howmore dressed himself at full speed, and hastened to his employer’s private house on the outskirts of the town.

The date is between twenty and thirty years ago. The place is an English sea-port. The time is night. And the business of the moment is — dancing. The Mayor and Corporation of the town are giving a grand ball, in celebration of the departure of an Arctic expedition from their port. The ships of the expedition are two in number — the Wanderer and the Sea-mew. They are to sail (in search of the Northwest Passage) on the next day, with the morning tide.

The weary old nineteenth century had advanced into the last twenty years of its life. Towards two o’clock in the afternoon, Ovid Vere (of the Royal College of Surgeons) stood at the window of his consulting-room in London, looking out at the summer sunshine, and the quiet dusty street. He had received a warning, familiar to the busy men of our time — the warning from overwrought Nature, which counsels rest after excessive work. With a prosperous career before him, he had been compelled (at only thirty-one years of age) to ask a colleague to take charge of his practice, and to give the brain which he had cruelly wearied a rest of some months to come. On the next day he had arranged to embark for the Mediterranean in a friend’s yacht.

WE were three quiet, lonely old men, and SHE was a lively, handsome young woman, and we were at our wits' end what to do with her. A word about ourselves, first of all - a necessary word, to explain the singular situation of our fair young guest. We are three brothers; and we live in a barbarous, dismal old house called The Glen Tower. Our place of abode stands in a hilly, lonesome district of South Wales. No such thing as a line of railway runs anywhere near us. No gentleman's seat is within an easy drive of us. We are at an unspeakably inconvenient distance from a town, and the village to which we send for our letters is three miles off.

The Guest Writes and Tells the Story of the Dinner Party. MANY years have passed since my wife and I left the United States to pay our first visit to England.

It may be that women have no positive appreciation of what is beautiful in form and color--or it may be that they have no opinions of their own when the laws of fashion have spoken. This at least is certain, that not one of them in a thousand sees anything objectionable in the gloomy and hideous evening costume of a gentleman in the nineteenth century. A handsome man is, to their eyes, more seductive than ever in the contemptible black coat and the stiff white cravat.

Experience of the reception of _The Fallen Leaves_ by intelligent readers, who have followed the course of the periodical publication at home and abroad, has satisfied me that the design of the work speaks for itself, and that the scrupulous delicacy of treatment, in certain portions of the story, has been as justly appreciated as I could wish. Having nothing to explain, and (so far as my choice of subject is concerned) nothing to excuse, I leave my book, without any prefatory pleading for it, to make its appeal to the reading public on such merits as it may possess. -- Wilkie Collins, GLOUCESTER PLACE, LONDON, July 1st, 1879

Published in 1886, Wilkie Collins The Evil Genius is a dramatic novel about the life of Sydney, who struggles to support herself as a governess. She disrupts the Linsley household by falling in love with the father of the child she is hired to teach. The Linsleys divorce, and Mrs. Linsley is compelled to leave the home. The plot thickens further when Captain Bennydeck is introduced.

TO JOHN FORSTER. In acknowledgment of the services which he has rendered to the cause of literature by his “Life of Goldsmith;” and in affectionate remembrance of a friendship which is associated with some of the happiest years of my life. Readers in general — on whose friendly reception experience has given me some reason to rely — will, I venture to hope, appreciate whatever merit there may be in this story without any prefatory pleading for it on my part. They will, I think, see that it has not been hastily meditated or idly wrought out. They will judge it accordingly, and I ask no more. Readers in particular will, I have some reason to suppose, be here and there disturbed, perhaps even offended, by finding that “Armadale” oversteps, in more than one direction, the narrow limits within which they are disposed to restrict the development of modern fiction — if they can. Nothing that I could say to these persons here would help me with them as Time will help me if my work lasts. I am not afraid of my design being permanently misunderstood, provided the execution has done it any sort of justice. Estimated by the clap-trap morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book. Judged by the Christian morality which is of all time, it is only a book that is daring enough to speak the truth. LONDON, April, 1866.