Synopsis
Franklin Blake is in love with Rachel Verinder. The gem he gives her, the moonstone, disappears, and the police cannot solve the crime. Eventually, Rachel spurns Franklin, and he goes abroad in an attempt to forget her and recover. When Franklin's father dies and Franklin returns to England, he resolves to win her back by solving the mystery of the moonstone. For many years, it was believed that Collins wrote this powerful and influential novel while under the influence of laudanum, but that myth has been largely debunked.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1992-12-01 | | Series: | Everyman's Library (Cloth) |
| Size | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 19.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
Introduction by Catherine Peters
The elements which make up The Moonstone- a purloined Indian jewel which carries with it a mysterious curse, a stolid British police sergeant, a drama of theft and murder in a spacious country home- have been repeated, in slightly varying guises, throughout much of the detective fiction that Wilkie Collins' immensely popular 1868 novel gave birth to.
Industry Reviews
"'The Moonstone' is frightfully interesting: isn't the detective prime? Don't say anything about the plot; for I have only read on to the end of Belteridge's narrative, so don't know anything about it yet."
Letters - Robert Louis Stevenson (09/05/1868)
"'The Moonstone' is the first and last of the detective novels, and I would like to ask the addicts what more has really been added to the genre since his time."
Reference Books - V. S. Pritchett (01/01/1953)
"Taking everything into consideration, 'The Moonstone' is probably the finest detective story ever written. By comparison with its wide scope, its dovetailed completeness and the marvellous variety and soundness of its characterization, modern mystery fiction looks thin and mechanical. Nothing human is perfect, but 'The Moonstone' comes about as near perfection as anything of its kind can be."
Reference Books - Dorothy L. Sayers
"'The Moonstone' is the best and greatest of English detective novels....[It] maintains its interest and suspense at every moment."
Times Literary Supplement - T. S. Eliot (08/04/1927)
"[In] 'The Moonstone' the skill of construction is so exquisite, so complete, so masterly, that we follow the thread of the story with unflagging enjoyment and a perpetually changeful and delightful perplexity of conjecture as to what the upshot is to be; and when this upshot comes, it is all that sympathy could have desired, and more than ingenuity could have conceived...."
Fortnightly Review - Algernon Charles Swinburne (11/01/1889)
"[When readers] have read to the end, we recommend them to read the book over again from the beginning, and they will see...the carefully elaborate workmanship and the wonderful construction of the story; the admirable manner in which every circumstance and incident is fitted together, and the skill with which the secret is kept to the last....Few will read of the final destiny of 'The Moonstone' without feeling the tears rise in their eyes...."
Athenaeum (London), 19th-century - Geraldine Jewsbury (07/25/1868)
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