Multiple Narratives & Relative Truths: a Study ofThe Ring and the Book, The Woman in White, andThe Moonstone

1982 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 143-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Lonoff
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Other ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone

Across the span of a single decade, Robert Browning and Wilkie Collins published, respectively, a poem and two novels with similarly innovative structures. All three works are multiple narratives; that is, they are narrated by several of their characters who function both as actors and witnesses. All three were immediately popular, and all three continue to be regarded as major achievements of their audiors.The Woman in White, serialized inAll the Year Roundfrom 1859 to 1860, quickly became the talk of London and remained so preeminent among Collins's novels that in his will he requested as his epitaph, “author ofThe Woman in Whiteand other works of fiction.”The Ring and the Book, begun in 1864 and inspired by a source that Browning found in 1860, was issued in four volumes, two in 1868 and two in 1869. LikeThe Woman in White, it was widely discussed and admired, exalting Browning's reputation even among readers who had earlier been critical.The Moonstone, begun in 1867 and published serially inAll the Year Roundduring 1868, was not initially as popular as the other two, although its publisher reported that “crowds of anxious readers” waited for the latest serial installments; but today it is Collins's most celebrated novel, often (though inaccurately) cited as the first detective novel in English.

scholarly journals Alternative Visions Of Crime And Community In Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White And The Moonstone

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
To Come ◽  
Police Detective ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Detective Genre

When T. S. Eliot described Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as the “first and greatest of English detective novels” (413), he could not have predicted the number of writers who would take issue with his brief phrase. While some have embraced Eliot’s adjectives (Bisla; Hennelly), others have critiqued the “first” and “greatest” descriptors, identifying Collins’ predecessors (Duncan; Klimaszewski), and contemporaries who offer The Moonstone some competition for the title of “greatest” (Smillie; Thomas). Still others have taken issue with defining the novel as “English,” due to its anti-Imperialist critiques (Narayan; Roy). Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Tamar Heller and D. A. Miller, the descriptor I choose to trouble in this essay is “detective.” Though The Moonstone inarguably contains a detective character, and a complex mystery that is indeed solved through detection, I argue that, especially when viewed in conjunction with Collins’ earlier novel The Woman in White (1859), Collins should be understood not as establishing the conventions of the detective novel to come, but as working against the tide of a developing genre which became increasingly police- and law-focused. Rather than valorizing the police detective or reifying the justness of the legal system, these novels articulate a vision of crime and justice outside of the boundaries of law and policing, one markedly different from the “detective” genre Eliot credits Collins with founding.

scholarly journals Alternative Visions Of Crime And Community In Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White And The Moonstone

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
To Come ◽  
Police Detective ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Detective Genre

When T. S. Eliot described Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as the “first and greatest of English detective novels” (413), he could not have predicted the number of writers who would take issue with his brief phrase. While some have embraced Eliot’s adjectives (Bisla; Hennelly), others have critiqued the “first” and “greatest” descriptors, identifying Collins’ predecessors (Duncan; Klimaszewski), and contemporaries who offer The Moonstone some competition for the title of “greatest” (Smillie; Thomas). Still others have taken issue with defining the novel as “English,” due to its anti-Imperialist critiques (Narayan; Roy). Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Tamar Heller and D. A. Miller, the descriptor I choose to trouble in this essay is “detective.” Though The Moonstone inarguably contains a detective character, and a complex mystery that is indeed solved through detection, I argue that, especially when viewed in conjunction with Collins’ earlier novel The Woman in White (1859), Collins should be understood not as establishing the conventions of the detective novel to come, but as working against the tide of a developing genre which became increasingly police- and law-focused. Rather than valorizing the police detective or reifying the justness of the legal system, these novels articulate a vision of crime and justice outside of the boundaries of law and policing, one markedly different from the “detective” genre Eliot credits Collins with founding.

Man and Wife

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Country House ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Status Of Women

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

“THESE VERBAL PUZZLES”: WILKIE COLLINS, NEWSPAPER ENIGMAS, AND THE VICTORIAN READER AS SOLVER

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-314
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Variety ◽  
The Third ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Moonstone

In 1861, in a reviewof Wilkie Collins'sThe Woman in White, a critic for theSpectatorcomplained that, “We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel … the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” (“The Enigma Novel” 20). He was hardly the only reviewer to use a vocabulary of “puzzlement” or “enigma” when discussing Collins's work. Whether we look to an earlier review ofThe Woman in Whiteto find Collins faulted as “not a great novelist … the fascination which he exercises … [is] that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume” (Rev. ofThe Woman in White249) – or whether we turn to a critic ofThe Moonstone, who found Collins and his latest production “[un]worthy”: “We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which he has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzles on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity” (Page, ed. 171–72) – we come up against the fact that Collins's novels, and especially his sensation novels, were sometimes known as “enigma novels” in the Victorian period. We can see too that this was not necessarily intended as a complimentary label. Indeed, though our own contemporary tendency has been to employ this particular moniker in a more neutral, descriptive register – to denote simply some fictions' reliance on mystery – we quickly find that Victorian reviewers were not so dispassionate in their usage. Instead, tracking names like “conundrum novel” or “enigma novel,” and terms like “puzzle,” “enigma,” and even “anagram,” shows that Collins's critics often used such phrases to index some of the same kinds of problems or concerns they more familiarly described with a rhetoric of “sensation.” A short survey suggests that their language of “puzzles” and “enigmas,” like their language of shocks and nerves, expressed disappointment at Collins's tendency to create anticlimaxes (the novel fizzles when the “puzzle” is solved); his emphasis on plot – or “carefully prepared enigma[s]” – over character; and his potential to render readers amoral and passive – patient attendants of solutions (“the key to which is not handed to us”) – rather than creatively engaged thinkers or moral questers. A simple nickname would seem to be a damning label indeed, on fuller survey.

Wilkie Collins and the Woman in White

PMLA ◽  
1939 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clyde K. Hyder
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Woman In White

Inscribed on a tombstone in Kensal Green Cemetery are the following words: “In memory of Wilkie Collins, author of ‘The Woman in White’ and other works of fiction.” This inscription, written (as his will shows) by Collins himself, pays tribute to the book which probably stands highest among his works in the esteem of his readers.

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

2021 ◽  
pp. 316-319
Author(s):  
Joanne Shattock ◽  
Joanne Wilkes ◽  
Katherine Newey ◽  
Valerie Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Woman In White

‘Is This an Hotel? Are There Thieves in the House?’

2020 ◽  
pp. 204-239
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Criminal Behaviour ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

This chapter suggests that tenancy plays a major role in nineteenth-century detective fiction, an emerging genre that counted Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Warren Adams as enthusiastic early practitioners. The chapter starts by investigating the relationship between geography, class, and morality in contemporary social discourses, focusing on the ‘low’ or ‘common’ lodging house in London. Low lodging houses were widely associated with criminal behaviour, and Dickens and Collins were interested in the function they could perform in their fiction. The chapter moves on to examine the murders that take place in Bleak House, The Moonstone, and The Notting Hill Mystery, and argues that rented space becomes a tool in the battle between detective and criminal. The chapter ends with an extended reading of Krook’s lodging house and rag-and-bone shop in Bleak House. Here, a mystery narrative intersects with farce and the Gothic, attesting to the porosity between aesthetic forms.

Gender-to-Gender Anxiety and Influence in Robert Browning's Men and Women

1986 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 97-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura E. Haigwood
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Successful Attempt ◽  
Married Life ◽  
Important Exception ◽  
Wife Of Bath ◽  
Intellectual Independence

In their courtship and marriage, the Brownings did not contend for that “mastery” the wife of Bath and other traditional sources of marital wisdom cite as the usual object of competition between the sexes. Instead they struggled over the privilege of admiring and serving the other. Robert Browning won that competition, his victory both symptom and cause of a poetic silence that lasted throughout most of his married life. An important exception to his prolonged inactivity is Men and Women, Browning's successful attempt at bringing his innovative style to full, sustained articulation. In order to achieve the kind of psychological, as well as intellectual, independence that would enable him to speak “in [his] true person” (“One Word More,” line 137), however, the poet needed to alter the terms of his relationship with his wife, who was both the emotional center of his life and a more successful, more popular poet. Browning achieved this separation in Men and Women, particularly in “One Word More.”

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