'Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?'

A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves.

One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins's novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that grows imaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.

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Features

• The text is that of the 1871 corrected edition
• The Introduction and Notes take into account the enormous amount of new material previously unavailable, including Collins's Letters, searchable periodicals, and publication of manuscript material
• The Introduction sees the novel as a bravura exploration of mistaken judgments; as a plot that strikingly reflected Collins's own private life; and as a dazzling meditation on what can, but also importantly, cannot be merely made into sense
• Three appendices provide a cartoon reaction to the conclusion of the novel in 1875; a detailed review of the dramatized version in 1877; and the long letter of advice that Collins received about how to manage the end of the novel

New to this Edition

• New introduction, select bibliography and explanatory notes

ABOUT THE SERIES

For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone
Explanatory notes
Index

Wilkie Collins

Edited by Francis O'Gorman, Saintsbury Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

He has edited Anthony Trollope's The Duke's Children (2011), Framley Parsonage (2014), The Way We Live Now (2016), and Orley Farm (2018) as well as Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (2014) and John Ruskin's Praeterita (2012) for Oxford World's Classics. His other most recent books include the Twenty-first Century Oxford Authors, Algernon Charles Swinburne (2016) and volume 5 of the Oxford English Texts, Selected Prose of Edward Thomas (2017).