The Moonstone (Signet Classics) - Softcover

Collins, Wilkie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451531221 ISBN 13: 9780451531223

Publisher: Signet Classic, 2009

Synopsis

The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple, is bequeathed to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday, but it is stolen again that very night. No one is above suspicion as the indefatigable Sergeant Cuff pieces together a series of events as mystifying as an opium dream and as deceptive as the nearby Shivering Sand.
 
T. S. Eliot praised The Moonstone as “the first…and the best of modern English detective novels.” To this day, it draws the reader into its world of danger, suspense, and societal anxiety. Collins unmasks a restrictive society marked by sexual and imperial domination, as well as the often-ignored underside of Victorian life. In his hands, facts, identities, and memory are only transient. This spellbinding mystery, narrated in turn by characters highborn and lowborn, is a fascinating excursion into the shadows that lie just beyond the ordered landscape of English society.
  
With an Introduction by Alev Lytle Croutier and an Afterword by Lillian Nayder

About this title

About the Author

William Wilkie Collins (1824­–89) was born in London. He was educated for the law, but instead became a writer, achieving great popularity with such novels as The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and his masterpiece, The Moonstone (1868). His life, both personal and professional, was profoundly affected by his friendship with Charles Dickens, who helped guide and ardently championed Collins’s writing, and whose work in turn was stimulated by Collins’s use of mystery and suspense. Though increasingly handicapped by a painful disease and by dependence on opiates used for relief, Collins continued to produce novels until three years before his death.
 
Alev Lytle Croutier, whose books have been translated into twenty-one languages, is the only woman novelist from Turkey to be published extensively worldwide. She is the author of the international bestseller Harem: The World Behind the Veil, novels such as The Palace of Tears and Seven Houses, and, for young readers, American Girl’s Leyla: The Black Tulip. The founding editor and editor-in-chief of Mercury House publishing company, she lectures frequently at universities, museums, and conferences.
 
Lillian Nayder is Professor of English at Bates College, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British fiction. She is the author of Wilkie Collins (1997) and Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (2002). With Graham Law, she coedits the Wilkie Collins Society Journal.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Signet Classic
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0451531221
• ISBN 13: 9780451531223
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 561