Найти книгу: "The Woman in White"

First published serially between 1859 and 1860, “The Woman in White” is Wilkie Collins’s epistolary novel that tells the tale of Walter Hartright, who encounters a woman all dressed in white on a moonlit road in Hampstead. Hartright helps the woman to find her way back to London. The woman warns him against an unnamed baronet and after they part he discovers that she may have escaped from an insane asylum. Hartright travels to Cumberland where he takes up a position as the art tutor of Laura Fairlie and her devoted half-sister, Marian Halcombe, who are somehow entangled with this mysterious “woman in white”. Wilkie Collins’s fifth published novel, “The Woman in White” is considered one of the earliest examples of the mystery genre, an early work of detective fiction, and one of the finest examples of sensationalist literature. While the novel was a commercial success when first published it was harshly reviewed by critics of the age. Since that time it has come to be regarded as a groundbreaking work of the mystery genre, one of Collins’s best. This edition includes a biographical afterword.

This spirited account of the exploits of a crew of Saxon archers during the Hundred Years War features cameo appearances by historical figures such as Edward III and the Black Prince. Flavorful and realistic in its depictions of medieval life, the novel combines the excitement of a rugged adventure with the romance of chivalry.

"Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild…"