No Name (Penguin Classics)

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The book was dramatized as Great Temptation by Collins and Wybert Reeve, who played "Captain Wragge" to great effect. Her desire for revenge over her rapacious relative is understandable – but neither she nor Wilkie Collins seem to have a clear objective or ‘plan of engagement’. No Name is a touching story of a woman's quest to redress an injustice that has caused her and her sister to become outcasts, penniless, and robbed of their rightful inheritance due to a mere legality. It has to be said that towards the end of this over-elaborated story, the plot collapses somewhat into a spate of melodramatic improbabilities. I pitied her and feared for her as she was beset by enemies who had their own selfish agenda re the Vanstone fortune and were equally determined to keep her destitute and penniless.

How Magdalen succeeds and fails is the gist of this novel and as always Mr Collins is able to weave out a tale that keeps the reader going through page after page. Of course, the supporting cast are fantastic: Mrs LeCount, Noel Vanstone, Admiral Bartram, Mazey the old sailor, Mrs Wragge and my favourite of them all, the arch-swindler, Captain Wragge. Wragge and Lecount plot against and attempt to outdo each other; in the end, Lecount is sent on a false errand to Zurich. Having been disinherited by the combination of the law of primogeniture and the greed of her relatives, she embarks upon a scheme of recovering her inheritance by marrying the very man who has robbed her of her rights.The 1860s saw Collins' creative high-point, and it was during this decade that he achieved fame and critical acclaim, with his four major novels, 'The Woman in White' (1860), 'No Name' (1862), 'Armadale' (1866) and 'The Moonstone' (1868). This is confirmed when Vanstone and his wife die suddenly, and by the laws of inheritance Vanstone’s estate goes to his legitimate next of kin – who happens to be his estranged brother Michael. But I don't know why I kept postponing starting this novel, which had been in my shelves for quite a long time.

The suspense in the drama focuses on what the two girls do and how their now penniless situation affects the proposed marriage of one of them, a marriage that was supposed to occur shortly.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. What I found remarkable in this book is that the main character, Magdalen, although defying convention, is entirely bound by it. She is then detected in her spying by the Admiral’s loyal retainer Mazey, but allowed to escape from the estate next morning. The problem with having so many books of interest is that sometimes it is too long between reads of authors I enjoy.