Wilkie Collins strana 2 z 5

Published 10 years after Collins’s most popular novel The Woman in White, Man and Wife centres on the confused and inequitable marriage laws of 19th-century Britain, reflecting the author’s own antipathy towards the institution. The plot follows the fortunes of a woman who, committed to marriage with one man, comes to believe that she may have inadvertently married his friend, according to the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland.

A masterful blend of Gothic drama and romance, Wilkie Collins’s mystery novel is an exploration of illegitimacy and inheritance. Set in Cornwall, the plot foreshadows The Woman in White with its themes of doubtful identity and deception, and involves a broad array of characters. The ‘secret’ of the book’s title is the true parentage of the book’s heroine, Rosamond Treverton, which has been written down and kept in an unused room at Porthgenna Tower.

Magdalen and Norah Vanstone have known only comfort and affluence for their entire lives. Orphaned suddenly following the unexpected deaths of their parents, the illegitimate sisters find themselves flung into the other extreme of living: their father had neglected to amend his will following their parents’ recent marriage, leaving them with nothing, and their bitter, estranged uncle, the legal inheritor of the family fortune, mercilessly refuses them support.

Two young men linked by a familial murder mystery, a beautiful yet wicked governess who spins a web of deceit, and five individuals named Allan Armadale: Wilkie Collins’s follow-up to The Woman in White and No Name is an innovative take on mistaken identity, the nature of evil and the dark underbelly of Victorian England.

When Lord Montbarry dies suddenly in his Venice palace, and his courier goes missing, suspicion is instantly thrown on his new wife, the beautiful Countess Narona, who has collected his life insurance and fled to America. Montbarry’s former fiance´ Agnes, still harbouring feelings for him, and Henry Westwick, Montbarry’s younger brother, decide to investigate this tragedy and head for the palace, now a hotel.

Komplet Šimek & Nárožný & Sobota 1971-1977 přímo navazuje na předchozí album Šimek & Grossmann 1966-1971. Nejlepší léta komického tria v nahrávkách zcela neznámých, nově objevených i těch, které publikum už léta miluje!

Ancient Rome, AD 408: Young Antonia had the misfortune to live in interesting times -- the days when mighty Rome was brought low by the terror of the Goths.

A high ranking Catholic priest schemes to recover land considered Church property.

A tale of criminality, almost revolting from its domestic horrors.

Armadale (1866) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century semi-epistolary novel. Some chapters consist of letters between the various characters, while other chapters record the events as the characters perceive them.The novel has a convoluted plot about two distant cousins both named Allan Armadale. The father of one had murdered the father of the other (the two fathers are also named Allan Armadale). The story starts with a deathbed confession by the murderer in the form of a letter to be given to his baby son when he grows up. Many years are skipped over. The son, mistreated at home, runs away from his mother and stepfather, and takes up a wandering life under the assumed name of Ozias Midwinter. He becomes a companion to the other Allan Armadale, who throughout the novel never discovers the relationship. But Ozias is constantly haunted by feeling that he might harm Allan, first after he reads the letter left for him, and then again after they spend the night on a shipwreck off the Isle of Man--the ship turning out to be the same on which the old murder took place (the murderer locked his victim in a cabin as the boat filled with water). On the boat, Allan has a mysterious dream involving three characters. This dream fills Ozias with foreboding, its three scenes becoming fulfilled in the course of the novel.

Valeria Woodville's first act as a married woman is to sign her name in the marriage register incorrectly, and this slip is followed by the gradual disclosure of a series of secrets about her husband's earlier life, each of which leads on to another set of questions and enigmas. Her discoveries prompt her to defy her husband's authority, to take the law into into a labyrinthine maze of false clues and deceptive identities, in which the exploration of the tangled workings of the mind becomes linked to an investigation into the masquerades of femininity. Probably the first full-length novel with a woman detective as its heroine, The Law and the Lady is a fascinating example of Collins's later fiction. First published in 1875, it employs many of the techniques used in The Moonstone, developing them in bizarre and unexpected ways, and in its Gothic and fantastic elements The Law and the Lady adds a significant dimension to the history of detective fiction.

When a condemned woman asks the local Minister to take her daughter home, the childless man is touched and finds himself unable to refuse. Yet the prisoner is unrepentant of the murder of her husband. Will her vices be passed on to this seemingly sweet child?

No Name (1862) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century novel revolving around the issue of illegitimacy.The story begins in 1846, at Combe-Raven in West Somersetshire, the country residence of the happy Vanstone family. When Andrew Vanstone is killed suddenly in an accident and his wife follows shortly thereafter, it is revealed that they were not married at the time of their daughters' births, making their daughters "Nobody's Children" in the eyes of English law and robbing them of their inheritance.

Widely regarded as the precursor of the modern mystery and suspense novels, The Moonstone tells of the events surrounding the disappearance of a mysterious (and cursed) yellow diamond. T. S. Eliot called it 'the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels'. It contains a number of ideas which became common tropes of the genre, including a crime being investigated by talented amateurs who happen to be present when it is committed, and two police officers who exemplify respectively the 'Scotland Yard bungler' and the skilled, professional detective.

The Woman in White is an epistolary novel written by Wilkie Collins in 1859, serialized in 1859–1860, and first published in book form in 1860. It is considered to be among the first mystery novels and is widely regarded as one of the first (and finest) in the genre of 'sensation novels'.As was customary at that time, The Woman in White was first published as a magazine serial. The first episode appeared on 29 November 1859, following Charles Dickens's own A Tale of Two Cities in Dickens's magazine All the Year Round in England, and Harper's Magazine in America. It caused an immediate sensation. Julian Symons (in his 1974 introduction to the Penguin edition) reports that "queues formed outside the offices to buy the next instalment. Bonnets, perfumes, waltzes and quadrilles were called by the book's title. Gladstone cancelled a theatre engagement to go on reading it. And Prince Albert sent a copy to Baron Stockmar."(from Wikipedia)

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Woman in White" by Wilkie Collins. 'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop ...There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth ...stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'. "The Woman in White" famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, "The Woman in White" is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism. "The Penguin English Library" - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.