Book Description
A mystery of unrelenting suspense and penetrating characterization, The Dead Secret explores the relationship between a fallen woman, her illegitimate daughter, and buried secrets in a superb blend of romance and Gothic drama. Reprinted here in the only critical edition available, is the text of the first edition, including Collins's preface and revisions. A superb introduction relates the text to Collins's love of the theatre, and previous and subsequent works.


From the Publisher
"I want something I can "read" read." That's a sentiment familiar to most readers, expressive of a desire for a thumping good tale, for stirringly compelling storytelling. The immensely popular Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins has long been a favorite with those who find themselves in the mood to "read" read. Originally published in 1857, "The Dead Secret," with its powerful blend of sensational drama and gripping psychological portraiture, shows Collins to be a master storyteller indeed.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Collins's puzzle-romance. A secret has all but ruined the life of young Sarah Leeson; it must be uncovered, but when it is, there is a desastrous revelation.

SYNOPSIS

Shocking, long-hidden secrets lie at the heart of this classic tale of mystery and suspense from the author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

Master Victorian entertainer Collins's fourth novel, and the first to be serialized in weekly installments, dates from 1857. It begins at Porthgenna Tower, the Cornish estate of Captain Treverton, at the deathbed of the Captain's wife. Before she dies, she insists on having her trusted maid, Sarah Leeson, write her husband a letter giving an account of a secret only the two women share, and swear, on pain of haunting, not to destroy the letter or to take it away from Porthgenna herself. Scrupulously following her mistress's bidding, Sarah hides the letter in an unused room of the Tower, leaves a note telling Treverton that his wife confided a secret to her she is afraid to reveal to him—and then vanishes from Cornwall, leaving the house, which Treverton has come to hate, to be abandoned, then purchased by a family whose blind son, Leonard Frankland, marries the Captain's daughter Rosamond years later when the real complications get underway. Modern readers, who will have no trouble figuring out the dead secret long before the characters do, are more likely to be engaged by the Dickensian minor characters, the hints of long-dormant intrigue, the heavy-breathing melodrama Collins would bring to perfection only three years later in The Woman in White, and, almost as an afterthought, the implied portrait of a whole social order few novelists in our more knowing time would ever attempt.