About this item
"When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else."The Moonstone, a yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple and believed to bring bad luck to its owner, is bequeathed to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday. That very night the priceless stone is stolen again and when Sergeant Cuff is brought in to investigate the crime, he soon realizes that no one in Rachel's household is above suspicion. Hailed by T. S. Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels," The Moonstone is a marvellously taut and intricate tale of mystery, in which facts and memory can prove treacherous and not everyone is as they first appear.Sandra Kemp's introduction examines The Moonstone as a work of Victorian sensation fiction and an early example of the detective genre, and discusses the technique of multiple narrators, the role of opium, and Collins's sources and autobiographical references.
About the Author
William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 - 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His best-known works are The Woman in White (1859) , No Name (1862) , Armadale (1866) , and The Moonstone (1868) , considered the first modern English detective novel.Born into the family of painter William Collins in London, he lived with his family in Italy and France as a child and learned French and Italian. He worked as a clerk for a tea merchant. After his first novel Antonina was published in 1850, he met Charles Dickens, who became a close friend, mentor and collaborator. Some of Collins' works were first published in Dickens' journals All the Year Round and Household Words and the two collaborated on dramatic and fictional works.Collins published his best known works in the 1860s, achieved financial stability and an international reputation. During this time he began suffering from gout took opium for pain and developed an addiction. During the 1870s and '80s the quality of his writing declined along with his health.Collins was critical of the institution of marriage and never married; he split his time between Caroline Graves except for a 2 year separation, and his common law wife Martha Rudd with whom he had 3 children. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Elliott & Fry [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
