Monatsarchive: Juli 2021

After Dark – Wilkie Collins

The setting for the six stories in this book is an episode in the life of a travelling portrait-painter, which we are made to learn through the charmingly simple narrative of his wife’s diary. Disabled for a time by weakness of the eyes from working at his profession, his wife suggests that he should fill up the consequent deficit in their purse by dictating to her “after dark,” when her household work is done, some of the good stories he has gathered in the course of his wanderings. The well-known necessity for getting a “sitter” to talk of something that will interest him and make him forget that he has to look dignified, renders the … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

The Ostler – Wilkie Collins

‘The Ostler” was originally published in 1855 as a short story, which later became the foundation for the much longer story ‘The Dream Woman.’ It is one of Wilkie Collins’ first supernatural stories, revolving around the forty-year-old Isaac Scatchard, who has a very strange dream of a young woman – or wasn’t it a dream, but a ghost? Seven years later he even gets more lost when he encounters a woman who looks very much like his strange dream creature ….

The Ostler.

Format: eBook.

The Ostler.

ISBN: 9783849658137

Excerpt from the text:

I

“Hullo, there! Hostler! Hullo-o-o!”

“My dear! why don’t you look for the bell?”

“I have looked—there is no bell.”

“And … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

Hide and Seek – Wilkie Collins

One of the principal characters in Mr. Collins’s “Hide and Seek” is an artist; but the writer has not sketched him as labouring in his vocation amid alternations of despair and hope. “The painter in this story,” he says, “only assumes to be a homely study from nature, done by a student who has had more opportunities than most men, out of the profession, of observing what the novelties of artist-life, and the eccentricities of artist-character, are really like, when they are looked at close. It may be necessary to mention this, by way of warning, as I have ventured on the startling novelty, in fiction, of trying to make an artist interesting, without … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

The Frozen Deep – Wilkie Collins

The main actor in this play, that was co-written with Mr. Charles Dickens, is Richard Wardour, a man of violent passions, who has been supplanted in the affections of the woman to whom he was ardently attached. He discovers his successful rival in a comrade in an arctic expedition. Eager, mad for revenge, he determines to kill him. They go forth together in the rear of a party dispatched in search of succor, Richard Wardour with murder in his thoughts, Frank Aldersley unsuspecting, con¿ding. Companionship in suffering restores the heart of humanity to Richard Wardour. Instead of being the destroyer of his rival, he becomes his savior.

The Frozen Deep.

Format: eBook.

The Frozen … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

A Rogue’s Life – Wilkie Collins

‘A Rogue’s Life’ was published in a magazine some twenty years before it was made into a book. It is a very clever story, and the interest is well sustained throughout. There is just about enough of it, inasmuch as a short tale like this is more interesting than some of the author’s longer works, wherein the complicated plots and lengthened mysteries are too apt to weary the reader before his curiosity is satisfied. We cannot help feeling quite an affection for the “Rogue,” perhaps because most of the other characters in the story are as selfish, more wicked, and not so frankly conceited as he is, and have none of his courage, audacity, … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

The Dead Secret – Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins possesses the art of writing plays and stories so as to awaken and sustain the interest of the reader. He can create and work out a plot. It is true that the subject-matter of the plot is generally rather trivial, the characters commonplace, the whole tone and cast of the work conventional and insignificant. But the story, such as it is, has the merit of being neatly and pleasantly told. The author has set himself assiduously to inquire how the materials which he has been able to collect should be strung together, what proportion the several parts should bear to each other, and how the end of the story may be constantly … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...