The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Please feel free to post any spoiler-free background information here. We have read a number of Wilkie Collins's books in this group, including The Moonstone, I Say No, and Basil. Below, I've copied over information about Wilkie Collins originally posted by Deborah in the "Focus on Our Authors" section:

Wilkie (William) Collins. 1824 to 1889 was a Victorian success with an income of approximately 10,000 pounds. Hr was the son of a landscape painter, William Collins. Godson to painter Sir David Wilkie, where he got his name. He lead a bohemian existence, and traveled extensively on long trips abroad with family. Collins struggled with choosing a career - studying painting, training with a tea merchant, studying law (1846), and called to the bar (1951). He had been writing throughout this time period. First published a short story in 1843, and in 1848 published a biography of his father. Later Collins would live n two serial common law families.

Collins is known for expert plotting of complex narratives, precise descriptive powers, and inventive approaches to narrative voice and point of view. In the story Ann Rodway (1856) published in Household Words, he uses a female de to give and starts using the diary form of narrative. He was a friend of Dickens. All the Year Round, successor of Household Words) first published Women in White in installments starting November 1859. Moonstone was also published by them in 1868.

Besides detective fiction, Collins wrote documentary type fiction about illegitimate children and prostitution. He also used that fiction to attack vivisection and the Jesuits. This type of fiction is considered sensationalist.

T.S. Elliot declared The Moonstone to be “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” Collins forte was raising the mystery novel to a higher level and creating the full length detective novel,

Source: Oxfor Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing

No Name, like many of Collins's books, is a sensation novel. Here is the description from the Goodreads page:

Magdalen Vanstone and her sister Norah learn the true meaning of social stigma in Victorian England only after the traumatic discovery that their dearly loved parents, whose sudden deaths have left them orphans, were not married at the time of their birth. Disinherited by law and brutally ousted from Combe-Raven, the idyllic country estate which has been their peaceful home since childhood, the two young women are left to fend for themselves. While the submissive Norah follows a path of duty and hardship as a governess, her high-spirited and rebellious younger sister has made other decisions. Determined to regain her rightful inheritance at any cost, Magdalen uses her unconventional beauty and dramatic talent in recklessly pursuing her revenge. Aided by the audacious swindler Captain Wragge, she braves a series of trials leading up to the climactic test: can she trade herself in marriage to the man she loathes?

Written in the early 1860s, between The Woman in White and The Moonstone, No Name was rejected as immoral by critics of its time, but is today regarded as a novel of outstanding social insight, showing Collins at the height of his powers.