Description
Right from its title, the novel carries an Indian flavour. Moonstone is the legendary diamond stone set in the forehead of the statue of god at Somnath. Apart from being sacred and of great religious significance, the diamond also seems to have miraculous powers.
The plot of the novel is complex. Rachel Verinder, a young Englishwoman, receives a large, Indian diamond as a gift on her eighteenth birthday. This diamond is a legacy from her uncle, a corrupt English army officer who had served in India. On the very night of her birthday, the diamond is stolen from her bedroom. Then follow days of sadness, grief, misery, and misfortunes till the mystery is solved. The rest of the story is unfurled as narratives by some of the main characters associated with the different aspects of the case, their interpretation of the theft, their efforts to find the thief and then recover the lost stone. With its elements of suspense and sensations, the novel is delightful to readers of all ages.
The Moonstone has been applauded by T.S. Eliot as ‘the best of English detective novels’.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White, and for The Moonstone, which has been proposed as the first modern English detective novel.
After Antonina, his first novel, appeared in 1850, Collins met Charles Dickens, who became a friend and mentor. Some of his work appeared in Dickens’s journals Household Words and All the Year Round. Collins gained financial stability and an international following by the 1860s, but became addicted to the opium he took for his gout, so that his health and writing quality declined in the 1870s and 1880s.
Collins’s works were classified at the time as “sensation novels”, a genre seen nowadays as the precursor to detective and suspense fiction. He also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women and on the social and domestic issues of his time. Collins first published most of his novels as serials in magazines such as Dickens’s All the Year Round, and was known as a master of the form, creating just the right degree of suspense to keep his audience reading from week to week.
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