Customer Reviews

Miss or Mrs? / The Haunted Hotel / The Guilty River

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I suppose I should look embarrassed to be reviewing Victorian sensationalist novels, but. . .I'm not. I love them and I'm not ashamed to admit. I enjoy nearly every British Victorian author I can find--with the notable exception of Dickens (*gag*) and Emily Bronte (who was NOT the best Bronte writer by a long-shot)--and Collins is one of my true favorites. From the supernatural to the just plain mean, from true love to deadly love, from. . .well, from any hackneyed plot device to any other hackneyed plot device, you can find it in Collins, and well written, too! (Of course, one must remember that many of the trite plot devices were not so well-used when he penned them.)

These three novellas give an excellent example of the varied nature of his stories. Miss or Mrs? is a story of true love, unrequited love, greed, dark deeds, and clandestine marriage featuring one of the most insipid heroines I've seen yet. And still I enjoyed it.

The Haunted Hotel is a truly estimable work of fiction. In it Collins combines the supernatural with a truly interesting mystery and a rather sweet love story subplot. He pits human goodness against human evil with a heroine that is almost as strong and brave as she is good. One must remember the times, though, and not expect her to NOT faint away from time to time. This was my second reading of this novella and I liked it even better this time. It's truly complex and twisty and quite enjoyable.

With The Guilty River, Collins leaves the supernatural dangers and shows his readers what can happen to someone suddenly and cripplingly handicapped. . . If that someone is willing to give in to his immoral side, that is. Like the other three, love is a prominent theme, featuring another dangerous triangle of lovers.

The Haunted Hotel is by far the best of the three, but the others are still enjoyable enough to those who like Victorian literature. If one is reading them and expecting them to be comparable with modern books--DON'T. Collins, as with all Victorian writers, must be read in the spirit it was written to be fully enjoyed.
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This collection of shorter Wilkie Collins "novellas" is right up to par with his other writings. The usual well-crafted plots are laid out in his typical, logical style and as always the attention to detail and the character development is top-notch. Collins fans will be delighted with these fast-reading page-turners, since they're shorter than his full-length masterpieces so you get to the satisfying conclusions sooner !!

I bought this collection of three novellas by Wilkie Collins after having read and studied all of his other novels, including the well-known "Woman in White." I was surprised, given his other fiction, that these novellas were so far-fetched as to be ridiculous, with characters that are no more than caricatures: the husband-murdering foreign countess, the jealous older fiancee, the crazed and obsessive lover. Naturally, the plots are utterly predictable. Unless you're a scholar doing your dissertation on Wilkie Collins and obliged to read every last scrap of his writing, I would not recommend that anyone waste time reading what is (and would have been in its day) cheap, sensational trash.

I'd read "The Moonstone" and "Woman in White" many years ago, and enjoyed being pulled into their fast-paced, atmospheric stories. These stories aren't in any way up to that standard. "Miss or Mrs" at least has some charming characters in the form of the "heroine"'s father and aunt -- the scare quotes are because, aside from her precocious voluptuousness, she is a rather inert character. "The Haunted Hotel" is rather silly, though it's no mean feat for it to outdo the other two for melodrama. (Better to read Hawthorne, though.) "The Guilty River" has the strongest atmosphere of mystery of the three, but by the time I reached it, I found my patience wearing thin. I'd embarked on the book hoping for a few evenings of cozy entertainment, but instead found it a chore. The stories may be great examples of some Victorian genre or other, but there's much other genre fiction of the late 19th & early 20th Centuries that's both more fun and more likely to tell you something about the society that generated it.