CC Spin #42: No Name

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 No Name, by Wilkie Collins

 Wilkie Collins was incredibly prolific, but this is one of his 'great four' novels, along with The Woman in White, Armadale, and The Moonstone.  So now I just need to read Armadale and I'll have the set!

 No Name is set in the late 1840s but was written in 1862 and serialized in All the Year Round.  It gets very exciting as it develops, and I enjoyed it a lot.  If you're interested in Victorian 'sensation' novels, this should be on your list.

The Vanstones are a happy and fairly wealthy family.  Mr. Vanstone is the most amiable and generous of men; his wife, a loving and gentle woman, but weighed down with a  dangerous late pregnancy.  Their two daughters are very different: Norah, in her mid-20s, a responsible and gentle brunette, and Magdalen, an energetic and mercurial 19 with unusual light grey eyes.

Ruin strikes when Mr. Vanstone is killed in a railway accident and the shock brings on labor and death to his wife.  The girls discover that their parents only recently married each other, because their father had made an early and disastrous marriage in Canada, and his actual wife had died just a few months before.  Mr. Vanstone was about to update his will but was killed instead -- and now the girls have No Name, no home, no fortune, and no future.  Instead, all the property will go to an elderly uncle they've never met, who refuses to consider them at all.

Norah prepares to become a teacher along with their governess, Miss Garth, who takes the girls to her sister's school.  Magdalen, however, is not prepared to put up with this treatment.  She is determined to get her father's fortune back by any means she can find; by any means necessary.  And so she sells her things and disappears.  No Name is the story of what lengths Magdalen will go to in order to gain the fortune she feels entitled to, and the people she will set herself against.

It's a pretty great story!  Magdalen is a great character and Collins surrounds her with interesting oddballs and cunning adversaries.  The further into the story I got, the less I could put it down.  A very fun read.

 







My Dover paperback came with the original illustrations


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