Blind Love
Blind Love is Wilkie Collins’s final novel. Although he did not live to complete the work, he left detailed plans for the last third of this absorbingly plotted novel which were faithfully executed by his colleague, the popular author Walter Besant. The novel is set during the Irish Land War of the early 1880s and…
The Dead Alive
In this 1874 novella by Wilkie Collins, the celebrated British writer of sensation fiction tells the tale of two brothers sentenced to be executed for having committed a murder that never occurred, and of the energetic Naomi Colebrook’s efforts to ferret out the truth and save the two innocents. As editor Anna Clark observes, Collins’s…
The Moonstone
Intrigue, investigations, thievery, drugs and murder all make an appearance in Collins’s classic who-done-it, The Moonstone. Published in serial form in 1868, it was inspired in part by a spectacular murder case widely reported in the early 1860s. Collins’s story revolves around a diamond stolen from a Hindu holy place. On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel…
The Evil Genius
Wilkie Collins is best known for his great mystery The Moonstone and The Woman in White—and for a life as sensational as are those novels. (The writer who famously advised other novelists to ‘make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait’ is now known to have kept entire households in different parts of England…
Heart and Science
Wilkie Collins’s later novels are often as concerned with social issues as they are with simple storytelling—but as more and more critics are suggesting, the best of them are as readable and thought-provoking today as they were when they first appeared. Of none is this more true than of his 1883 novel Heart and Science,…
The Broadview Editions Bookshelf
The Broadview Editions Bookshelf provides digital access to over 450 meticulously edited works of literature. For more than 30 years, Broadview’s editions have presented classic works of literature, both canonical and lesser-known, in a reader-friendly format with scholarly introductions, footnotes, and appendices to situate each work in its historical and cultural moment. This new digital…
The Broadview British Bookshelf
The Broadview British Bookshelf provides digital access to over 330 meticulously edited works of British Literature. For more than 30 years, Broadview’s editions have presented classic works of literature, both canonical and lesser-known, in a reader-friendly format with scholarly introductions, footnotes, and appendices to situate each work in its historical and cultural moment. This new…
Victorian
Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women: An Anthology Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems (19th C) Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry (1830s-1880s) (BABL Edition) In Memoriam (1850) Alfred, Lord Tennyson Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) Harriet Martineau Life in the Sick-Room (1844) Harriet Martineau Autobiography (1877) Harriet Martineau Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) Frances Trollope Factory Lives…
The Woman in White
As the inscription on his tombstone reveals, Wilkie Collins wanted to be remembered as the “author of The Woman in White,” for it was this novel that secured his reputation during his lifetime. The novel begins with a drawing teacher’s eerie late-night encounter with a mysterious woman in white, and then follows his love for…
Great Expectations
Originally published in serial form from December 1860 to August 1861, Great Expectations is the ‘autobiography’ of Pip, as he transformed from apprentice village blacksmith to a London gentleman. Unlike many of Dickens’s earlier works, the novel is not so much a protest against social evils as a sustained meditation upon the process of social…
The Story of a Modern Woman
Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman originally appeared in serial form in the women’s weekly The Lady’s Pictorial. Like Hepworth Dixon herself, the novel’s heroine Mary Erle is a woman writer struggling to make her living as a journalist in the 1880s. Forced by her father’s sudden death to support herself, Mary…
The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories
The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories beautifully demonstrates the astonishing variety and ingenuity of Victorian short stories. This collection brings together works focused on a wide range of popular Victorian subjects in many different styles and forms (including comic, gothic, fantasy, adventure, and colonial works; science fiction; children’s tales; New Woman writing; Irish yarns;…
Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond
Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond—among the most compelling and thought-provoking of Margaret Oliphant’s works of short fiction—tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Lycett-Landon, “two middle-aged people in the fullness of life and prosperity,” and of what becomes of their marriage when Mr. Lycett-Landon becomes uncommunicative while on an extended business trip. In addition to…
Concert of Voices – Second Edition
Concert of Voices combines poetry, fiction, drama, and essays in an anthology of world literature in English. This second edition preserves the first edition’s breadth and its balance of established and less widely known authors, while including a large selection of exciting new material. Biographical information and explanatory notes have been updated and expanded, and…
Aurora Floyd
Aurora Floyd is one of the leading novels in the genre known as ‘sensation fiction’—a tradition in which the key texts include Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Dickens’s Great Expectations. When Aurora Floyd was first published in serial form in 1862-63, Fraser’s magazine asserted that “a book without a…