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    Basil (A Story of Modern Life)
    Basil (A Story of Modern Life)
    Basil (A Story of Modern Life)
    Ebook388 pages7 hours

    Basil (A Story of Modern Life)

    By Wilkie Collins

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Basil, son of a father who values the family pedigree and who would not let him marry below his station, falls in love at first sight with a girl he sees on a bus. He follows her and discovers she is Margaret Sherwin, only daughter of a linen draper. He persuades her father to let him marry her secretly. He agrees on the condition, that, as his daughter is only seventeen, they live apart for the first year. At first the secret works, but then the mysterious Mannion, whose emotions cannot be read in his face, returns from abroad….
    Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known works are The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMusaicum Books
    Release dateAug 7, 2017
    ISBN9788027202492
    Basil (A Story of Modern Life)
    Author

    Wilkie Collins

    William Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. He wrote 30 novels, more than 60 short stories, 14 plays, and more than 100 essays. His best-known works are The Woman in White and The Moonstone.

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    Reviews for Basil (A Story of Modern Life)

    3.5/5

    91 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Although Basil is far from being one of Collins' best novels, I enjoyed it a lot; partly because I enjoyed thinking about this as an early example of Collins' writing and an early example of a Victorian sensation novel and partly because I really enjoyed the over-the-top melodrama of this story.Basil is the youngest son of an English gentlemen of large fortune, one of the most ancient families in the country. We are told how proud Basil's father is of his pedigree and his family name; it's no surprise then that when Basil falls in love at first sight with Margaret Sherwin, the daughter of a linen-draper, he feels unable to tell his father of his plans to marry her. Basil decides that it will be best to present his father with a fait accompli, to marry Margaret, then somehow get her introduced to his father and wait for his father to get accustomed to her before informing his father that they are married. Margaret's father agrees, as long as Basil marries Margaret straight away, and promises for the first year of their marriage, never to see her except in the presence of a third person: they will be married but will not live together as man and wife. The outcomes of this marriage are betrayal, insanity and death. Technically, I suppose those are spoilers but if a secret marriage wasn't enough to tell you that things aren't going to end well, there is a lot of rather heavy-handed foreshadowing in the first half of the novel. Basil was considered to be very shocking when it was first released and for a early Victorian novel there are a lot of sexual undercurrents in this work. To a modern reader, it's unlikely to be anywhere near as shocking, so it's a testimony to Collins' skill as a writer (albeit that his skill shows unevenly throughout this early work) that the central and pivotal scene in the book is still disturbing.
    • 4/5
      Kept me gripped throughout, even though some of the characters' actions and motivations seemed rather unlikely - Mannion's in particular.
    • 4/5
      BasilThis was an interesting story. Collins was a contemporary of Charles Dickens and there are some similarities in their style. This is a fictionalized autobiography of a young man from a very wealthy family who becomes infatuated and eventually secretly marries a woman, Margaret Sherwin.Her family is from the mercantile class and therefore below him in status. Nevertheless he courts her and they agree to marry but not live together for one year. The author knows that his father will disown him, hence the secrecy. He does not inform his beloved sister Clara, nor his brother Ralph of his marriage. Margaret's family, seeking to benefit financially maintain the charade while the author seems blind to what is going on behind the scenes.As the year end approaches, he has reason to suspect that all is not as it seems and that Margaret has been less than chaste with her father's assistant, Mannion. He tracks them to a hotel and beats Mannion to the point that he ends up in hospital with severe disfiguring injuries. Margaret contracts typhoid during a hospital visit and dies. You would think that this would release the author from his vows but Mannion seeks revenge.Good descriptions of psychology and society of the times.
    • 3/5
      This book is ok. I want to read some other books by this author to see if I did not like the writing or if this book is just an inferior work.
    • 3/5
      'Basil', being one of Collins earlier works, was never going to be as exciting or thrilling as his later novels 'The Woman in White' and 'The Moonstone'. I ventured to expect this when I voluntarily picked this book up to see the roots of the later masterpieces. 'Basil' is the beginning of the mystery thriller that Collins would adopt later on, and the inferiority of his treatment of this genre is easy to see. Whereas in 'The Moonstone' things were difficult to predict, and unable to see where things are going, the signs in 'Basil' are not discreet enough, there are no red herrings, what you read are the glaringly obvious hints that lead the story on and lead you to guess the subsequent events. This makes reading 'Basil' a lot less thrilling to read, and will pale in comparison to what you may have read in TWIW and TM. If you have not read these two novels, and you want to give Collins a try, this is not a good introduction (unless you take the length of the novel into account, which took me a day to read, whilst his later novels take three days). There is too much foreshadowing, and too much of it is made very clear. 'Basil' has a good basic plot, his characters well drawn out, but verging on stereotypical which is demonstrated on Basil's first dream of the two ladies in his life. One is dark, shrouded by wood in shadows, the other is pure and white, illuminated by sunshine and pleasant landscape. This is the basic concept of Margaret, his deceitful wife, and Clara, his virtuous sister. The protagonist can be difficult to like sometimes, his reasoning can be unconvincing, and his actions verge on stupidity, not on behalf of the character, but on behalf of Collins, on creating him. Other drawbacks are seen in the plot holes, and things that just wouldn't make logical sense of any person to act. Such as Robert writing a whole confession on everything he had done, leaving evidence of himself and Margaret to other eyes. On top of that, he chooses to omit certain details of his confession which seems nothing more than a scape goat of Collins as he cannot think of a decent enough argument that might have swayed Margaret to act as she did (though her motives are clumsingly added later on). This early work has flaws, but it's only a short work, and if you wanted to enlighten yourself of Collins' earlier work, this would be a good place to start as it foreshadows many themes to take hold of later novels, and also seems to have quite a bit of autobiographical detail which can allude to his secret life with his mistresses (the protagonist also has the exact same interest as Collins regarding his career). By all means, pick this book up, it's surely inferior, but it's highly readable and satisfies many curiosities that one may have of the author.
    • 4/5
      Our narrator, the Basil of the title, is the son of a rich gentleman who is proud of his family's ancient background and despises anyone of a lower social standing. When Basil meets Margaret Sherwin on a London omnibus he falls in love at first sight and becomes determined to marry her. Unfortunately Margaret is the daughter of a linen-draper, the class of person Basil's father disapproves of most of all, so he decides not to tell his family about her just yet.Mr Sherwin agrees to Basil marrying Margaret - but he insists that the wedding must take place immediately and that Basil must then keep the marriage secret for a whole year, not even seeing his wife unless Mr or Mrs Sherwin are present. This unusual suggestion should have told Basil that something suspicious was going on but he's so blinded by love that he doesn't care - until it's too late... Basil was one of Collins' earliest novels and it shows, as it's just not as good as his more famous books such as The Woman in White. The story took such a long time to really get started, with Basil introducing us to the members of his family, giving us every tiny detail of their appearance, personality and background. The second half of the book was much more enjoyable, filled with action, suspense and all the elements of a typical sensation novel including death, betrayal and adultery (Victorian readers apparently found the adultery scenes particularly shocking). There are lots of thunderstorms, people fainting and swooning, fights in the street, and everything you would expect from a Victorian melodrama.All of Collins' books are filled with strong, memorable characters and this was no exception. There's Basil's lively, carefree brother Ralph, his gentle, kind hearted sister Clara, the poor, frail Mrs Sherwin and the sinister Mr Mannion. However, I thought the overall writing style of this book was slightly different to what I've been used to in his later books – although I can't put my finger on exactly what the difference was. This is not a must-read book but if you like the sensation novel genre, you'll probably enjoy this one.
    • 3/5
      This is essentially yet another story of marry in haste; repent in leisure. Every reader had their period when they were ruled by their hormones; a few of us went so far as to think we "fell in love at first sight." Wilkie's character Basil does this with a young woman he sees riding the bus from London to the suburbs, one day. This 20-something, fresh-out-of-law-school, rich, aristocratic, spoiled young man thinks he knows all he needs to know about"Margaret" by looking at her beautiful face and gorgeous figure. Much woe is to come to him before sexually-mature Margaret is finished ruining Basil's life.

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    Basil (A Story of Modern Life) - Wilkie Collins

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