No Name, Wilkie Collins
No Name, Wilkie Collins
List: $63.00 | Sale: $44.11
Club: $31.50

No Name

Author: Wilkie Collins

Narrator: Lucy Scott

Abridged: 27 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/01/2020

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

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. They have no money, no rights and no name. Norah, the elder of the two, looks for work as a governess and accepts her fate. Fiery and headstrong Magdalen, however, does not. She vows revenge and schemes a series of traps to recover the fortune, no matter the cost...

About Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist who critics often credit with the invention of the English detective novel. Sergeant Cuff from Collins's novel The Moonstone became a prototype of the detective hero in English fiction. Collins's works center on mainstream Victorian domestic life. Collins liked to tackle social issues, and many of his novels contain sympathetic portraits of physically abnormal individuals. In addition to Moonstone, he is well known for his popular suspense thriller The Woman in White, No Name, and Armadale.

Collins was born in London in 1824 to William Collins, a well-known landscape painter, and Harriet Collins, the daughter of a painter. Despite a secure home, he was a small, sickly child and had a slightly deformed skull. He was educated privately and studied painting for several years. He later studied law and became a lawyer at the age of twenty-seven. Collins never practiced law, but he did put his legal knowledge to work in his crime writing.

In 1851, Collins met his lifelong friend and mentor Charles Dickens while they were pursuing a mutual interest in amateur theater. Dickens helped Collins bring humor and believable characters into his books.The two women in Collins's life-Caroline Graves, his life-long companion, and Mrs. Martha Rudd, his mistress-also greatly influenced his writing.

During the 1860s, Collins started to suffer severely from rheumatic pains and became addicted to laudanum, a form of opium. The death of Dickens in 1870 robbed him of his powerful inspiration, and his popularity declined. In 1873, he met Mark Twain and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on a trip to the United States. Soon thereafter he wrote The Evil Genius, which was published in 1886. Collins died from a stroke on September 23, 1889.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on October 20, 2017

Everything in the Vanstone household is just tickety boo until a) father dear is killed in a train crash and b) mama dear dies in childbirth so c) their two lovely daughters are orphaned and there are complications whereby the estate is inherited by the estranged older brother who couldn't give a mo......more

Goodreads review by Paul on September 20, 2024

"Mr Vanstone's daughters are Nobody's Children ... and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle's mercy!" When Mr and Mrs Vanstone are killed in an accident, an understandable oversight and the misogynistic vagaries of Victorian law have left their daughters, Magdalen and Norah, orphaned and penni......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth (Alaska) on December 07, 2019

The problem with having so many books of interest is that sometimes it is too long between reads of authors I enjoy. It has been over 3 years (!) since I last picked up a Wilkie Collins, and to be honest, it feels both much longer and much shorter. Where does the time go? I'd like to say it won't be......more

Goodreads review by Bradley on October 16, 2018

Wilkie Collins! I should mention that this guy is one hell of an interesting writer if I can go by anything said by Dan Simmons in Drood, since the author is the main character! Putting that all aside, which I probably should as it is a really, really bad idea in the first place, I must tamp down my i......more

Goodreads review by Magrat on November 22, 2018

Todo el mundo ama esta novela, y es una pena que yo no haya logrado disfrutar de esta historia tanto como esperaba, logró entretenerme, pero creo que no permanezca mucho tiempo en mi memoria... Hay dos razones por las que 'Sin nombre' no ha terminado de cuajar conmigo, la primera, el empeño detective......more