In the Library
Armadale
Wilkie Collins, 1866
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 21 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 46
- Length
- Length 296k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
On the near margin of the pool there stood the Shadow of a Woman.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White runs on the same engine of stolen identity and forged paper, but its great villain is a charming fat Count instead of a woman keeping her own diary.
£1.99
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Becky Sharp is Lydia Gwilt's elder sister in the trade, a penniless, brilliant woman who lies her way toward money and makes the respectable characters look dull.
£1.99
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
Doyle's Baskerville heir, like the two Allan Armadales, inherits a fortune with a family curse attached, and dread and cold plotting fight it out to the last page.
£1.99
About the book
Two men are called Allan Armadale, and neither chose it. One is fair and rich and blithely certain the world means him well; the other is dark and penniless and carries his father's deathbed confession that he once locked a drowning man behind a cabin door. On a wrecked timber ship the fair one falls asleep and dreams a pool at sunset, a woman's shadow standing at its edge, and a hand holding out a glass. Then Wilkie Collins gives that shadow a body and a name, and Lydia Gwilt walks in: forger at twelve, bigamist, poisoner, thirty-five, and by a wide margin the most alive person in Victorian fiction. She takes the novel away from everyone and keeps it, in a diary that plots a murder in the morning and by nightfall admits she has never loved anyone as she loves the man whose name she means to steal. Reviewers were appalled. Collins had seen them coming: estimated by the clap-trap morality of the present day, his preface answered, this may be a very daring book.