In the Library
No Name
Wilkie Collins, 1862
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 19 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 58
- Length
- Length 263k words
£1.99
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Mr. Vanstone's daughters are Nobody's Children; and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle's mercy.
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If you like this, try
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White runs on the same trick of a woman erased by the law, but Collins keeps that secret hidden instead of handing it over early.
£1.99
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Dickens builds another great machine around an illegitimate daughter and a mother's buried past, with the law grinding on and Inspector Bucket hunting the secret down.
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Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Becky Sharp is Magdalen Vanstone's elder sister in spirit, a penniless girl with a gift for acting who takes by cunning what society refused to give her.
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About the book
Halfway through the first volume, Collins gives the secret away, and tells you plainly in his preface that he has done it on purpose. Two sisters, comfortable and adored, learn that their parents married too late, and that English law therefore counts them as nobody's children with no claim on a penny of the eighty thousand pounds their father meant them to have. Every turn after that is foreshadowed before it arrives, and the book only tightens, because the suspense was never about what happens. It is about how far the younger sister will go. She goes a long way: a false name, a stage career, a professional swindler for a tutor, and at last a marriage undertaken in cold hatred, with a bottle of laudanum locked in her dressing case. Around her, Captain Wragge keeps his rogueries in ruled ledgers, red ink and black. Few Victorian novels are this angry, or this much fun.