This image is the cover for the book The Dead Alive and A Fair Penitent, Classics To Go

The Dead Alive and A Fair Penitent, Classics To Go

"The Dead Alive": A fitting companion to The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins produced one of the first, if not the first, court room drama in whose footsteps a myriad of subsequent authors have followed. Based on a true story, Collins adds a narrator and a confidant but few other embellishments illustrating how easily the cause of justice can be perverted. Along the way he casts a few jibes at "Americans" and Christianity in a moderately melodramatic tale that progresses to its inevitable conclusion of a wrongful conviction. "A Fair Penitent": The short story is written in the form of an editor presenting a manuscript by a former actress of the Paris stage in the early 18th century. This actress, a Mademoiselle Gautier, realises that her life of pleasure and vice is headed for a bad end and so she decides to enter a convent. Her desire to completely repent takes her from the rather cozy quarters of one order to the more austere regimen of the Carmelites. An encounter with a Trappist monk leader makes the idea of flagellation sound like the perfect recipe. (Goodreads)

Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright known for The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). The last has been called the first modern English detective novel. Born to a London painter, William Collins, and his wife, the family moved to Italy when Collins was twelve, living there and in France for two years, so that he learned Italian and French. He worked at first as a tea merchant. On publishing his first novel, Antonina, in 1850, Collins met Charles Dickens, who became a friend and mentor. Some Collins works appeared first in Dickens's journals Household Words and All the Year Round. The two also collaborated on drama and fiction. Collins reached financial stability and an international following in the 1860s from his best-known works, but began to suffer from gout. He took opium for the pain, but became addicted to it. His health and his writing quality declined in the 1870s and 1880s. Collins was critical of the institution of marriage: he later split his time between widow Caroline Graves, with whom he had lived most of his adult life, treating her daughter as his, and the younger Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children.

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