Category: Novels

“Ralph Connor” is the pen-name of a Canadian clergyman whose novels came into great vogue just at the end of the nineteenth century. His tales are, with one exception, set in the wild regions of Canada, usually in what is loosely called “the Northwest.” This is more literally middle Canada, the real North-west being still […]

This is the author’s most famous story and it has spread his fame over many lands, having been translated into many foreign languages. IN the suburbs of Moscow, at the end of the seventeenth century, Ruric Nevel, aged twenty-three, a gunmaker, and his mother, Claudia, lived in a small cot. Ruric was in love with […]

Although this is not the only novel by this writer, it is the only one that achieved any renown. It had so extraordinary a success for a time that it outsold every other book of its year, and went through many editions, later being dramatized and successfully presented on the stage. GILBERT VAUGHAN, a rich […]

VENTRILOQUISM was so little known in England in the earlier half of the last century that when Valentine Vox, a decent Suffolk youth, acquired the art for the sole purpose of amusing himself, he caused many mysterious disturbances in his native town. Some houses got the reputation of being haunted, others were searched for burglars […]

Antonina was the first novel that Wilkie Collins wrote. Its success was so pronounced as to give him at once a recognized place among the English writers of fiction of that time, a group that included Dickens, Thackeray, and Bulwer. It also led Collins to abandon the law and make a profession of novel-writing. Yet, […]

The Woman in White came next to The Moonstone in establishing the fame of William Wilkie Collins. In it as in his other novels he worked on a principle quite different from that of Gaboriau and Poe and the school practically founded by them. They and their followers begin almost invariably with the work of […]

A curious coincidence with respect to this story is that after thirteen monthly instalments of it had been published in a magazine three men one after another died of carbon-dioxide suffocation on a ship at Liverpool, precisely as Miss Gwilt died in the novel, and as Miss Gwilt had planned that Armadale should die. The […]

Early in life Stevenson wrote this story for a juvenile magazine, and it was well received. Later, in the height of his fame, he published it in book form. In the preface he wrote: “In the eyes of readers who thought less than nothing of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow was supposed to mark a […]

The sequel to Stevenson’s story of Kidnapped in reality consists of two tales, the first relating to the Appin murder, which forms a prominent feature of the earlier romance, and the other narrating the wooing of Catriona Drummond. Stevenson was living at Vailima, in Samoa, when he resumed, in 1892, after an interval of six […]

Stevenson was engaged upon this novel at the time of his death. It was conceived some time in 1892. The motive is ancient—a father condemning his son to death. The character of the Brutus was suggested by that of a famous “hanging judge,” Robert Macqueen, Lord Braxfield. Stevenson at first intended to call the novel […]