Wilkie Collins
8 books by Wilkie Collins to read free, each with its best passages and lines, and the best quotes from all of them below.
Where to start
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The Woman in White
A young drawing teacher falls in love with his aristocratic pupil, who falls victim to a devious plot to acquire her considerable fortune.
245,705 words, about 17 hours
Then
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The Moonstone
When a fabulous gem mysteriously goes missing, suspicion abounds and a hunt begins for the guilty party.
195,403 words, about 14 hours
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Basil
An aristocratic young man falls in love at first sight with a lower-class girl on an omnibus, with disastrous consequences.
115,926 words, about 8 hours
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Man and Wife
A young woman who has been made pregnant by an unscrupulous man tries to force him to marry her secretly, but much goes wrong with her plan.
226,866 words, about 16 hours
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The Haunted Hotel
The death in Venice of a wealthy man under very mysterious circumstances leads to suspicions of a supernatural cause.
62,780 words, about 4 hours
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No Name
After two sisters are unexpectedly and shockingly disinherited, the headstrong younger sister takes increasingly desperate measures to try to wrest back her family’s fortune.
263,406 words, about 18 hours
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The Law and the Lady
After a young woman discovers that her husband is concealing a terrible secret, she vows to discover the truth.
140,660 words, about 10 hours
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The Dead Secret
A maidservant is forced by her dying mistress to conceal a deep family secret, at great personal cost to herself.
139,813 words, about 10 hours
Wilkie Collins quotes
This is the story of what a woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.
“The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!”
We can neither know nor judge ourselves; others may judge, but cannot know us: God alone judges and knows too.
Man alive! what do you want more?
The startling contrast between the corpse-like pallor of her complexion and the overpowering life and light, the glittering metallic brightness in her large black eyes, held him literally spellbound.
Look where we may, the dark threads and the light cross each other perpetually in the texture of human life.
Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.
In her case, Art would have seemed to be the truth, because Nature looked like falsehood.
We all say it’s on the nerves, and we none of us know what we mean when we say it.
“The stain is taken off,” she said. “But the place shows, Mr. Betteredge—the place shows!”
The greatest charms that my sister has on the surface, come from beneath it.
“Will she end like me?”
“You have comforted many miserable women in your time,” she said. “Comfort one more, today.”
Persuasion distilled from his mildly-curling lips; and, shabby as he was, perennial flowers of courtesy bloomed all over him from head to foot.
I don’t doubt that it is a great privilege to be a human being. But may it not be the happier destiny to be an animal or a plant?
Miss Sturch never laughed, and never cried, but took the safe middle course of smiling perpetually.
The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.
“Is there any young lady in existence, sir, who could resist the temptation of accepting such a birthday present as The Moonstone?”
The very strength of her emotions was in their silence and their secrecy.
The manner of this gentleman was distinguished by a pliant grace and courtesy unknown to the present generation.
Reading paths
- Detective fiction, from the start How the detective story was invented, one famous case at a time.