No Name (Penguin Classics)

Product Information

I love the over the top style of Dickens, but can quite see why many people prefer the quieter style of Collins. Her vindictive nature is aroused when her uncle declines to take notice of them (due to their illegitimacy) and to provide for them or assist them. 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 penniless. I really thought that Magdalen was a complex character who definitely goes against many of the Victorian conventions of her time (which is why some critics of Collins time rejected this novel). A mysterious letter arrives from New Orleans, which means Mr Vanstone and his wife must go to London on ‘family business’.

Lecount is back from Zurich and explains who his wife really is, with the help of the cut bit of cloth from the brown alpaca dress. Pendril, tells Norah and Magdalen that despite appearances their parents had only been married for a few months, and their wedding invalidated the will which left everything to the daughters. Their father has made a rash clandestine marriage in America in his youth, and is only able to marry their mother when the father's first wife dies. Next day the governess Miss Garth is accosted by the dubious Captain Wragge who is making enquiries about Mrs Vanstone.After his first novel Antonina was published in 1850, he met Charles Dickens, who became a close friend, mentor and collaborator. Set in mid nineteenth century England, No Name is a highly dramatic story of revenge to reclaim lost family fortune. The sisters leave Coombe-Raven and go to live at a school run by Miss Garth’s sister in Knightsbridge. Typical elements included bigamous marriages, disputed wills, forgery, domestic violence, imprisonment, assumed identity, and madness. No Name was the first of these 'lesser' known works, though it's one of his Big Four of the 1860s (the other three being those already mentioned and Armadale, which I've purchased, but I've not yet managed to read).

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The money that was to provide for them went to an estranged uncle (Michael Vanstone) who refused to give them a dime. Scene One begins in 1846, at Combe-Raven in West Somerset, the country residence of the wealthy Vanstone family: Andrew Vanstone, his wife, and their two daughters.Actresses moved round from one town to another, unsupervised, un-chaperoned, in the company of single and married men – just as Magdalene does with Wragge and his troupe. The Moonstone and The Woman in White are the most popular novels and deservedly so, yet it's a shame that No Name doesn't share the same level of fame. There is something extremely disheartening and soul destroying when one reads a story where what is base and evil in man come so strongly to the fore. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. While this is an entirely different story than Dickens' Bleak House, both of the novels deal with the right of inheritance.

Magdalen is ill and destitute, on the verge of being sent to a hospital or the workhouse, when a handsome man appears and rescues her. Norah and Magdalen are the daughters of Andrew Vanstone, who is the owner of a country estate in Coombe-Raven, Somerset.I thought I’d hidden it well… 😉 Collins is one of those authors I feel I ought to like, but just don’t. Mr Clare receives the offer of an opening for Frank in the City, which he takes up without any real enthusiasm. Not only does this make the sisters illegitimate – a shameful thing in itself – but due to a quirk of the law it also prevents them from inheriting their father’s wealth. Under the law, the huge estate went to a man who hated the dead father and had been seeking revenge against him for what he considered a crime that he committed that affected him. Sinceramente creo que le sobran páginas, pero soy consciente que la mayor pega que le pongo es personal, la disfrutarán mucho a los que les diviertan las pesquisas detectivescas.