Product Description

At the centre of Hide and Seek (1854) a secret waits to be revealed. Why should the apparently respectable painter Valentine Blyth refuse to account for the presence in his household of the beautiful girl known as Madonna? It is not until his young friend Zack Thorpe, who is in rebellion against his repressive father, gets into bad company and meets a mysterious stranger that the secret of Madonna can be unravelled. Wilkie Collins's third novel, dedicated to his life-long friend Dickens, is a story in which excitement is combined with charm and humour. In its mixture of the everyday and the extraordinary, Hide and Seek forms a bridge between the domestic novel and the sensational fiction for which Collins later became famous.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #426537 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Customer Reviews

Still finding his feet
This novel from 1854, published six years before The Woman in White shows Wilkie Collins still finding his feet. He claims it was written in reaction to reviewers who said he couldn't `do' character; and unfortunately, the book, at this stage in his career at least, proves the critics had a point. Madonna Blyth, the orphaned deaf and dumb girl, whose origins are revealed in the climax to the plot, is boringly virtuous - actually, she's beyond boring: she's excruciating! - and many of the other characters are either implausible or dislikeable.

Originally, the novel was longer than the version available here; Collins cut it considerably for its republication, which is actually an advantage since the first half is really rather dull, not at all a page turner. Of course, there are some promising signs of things to come: for example, an effectively suspenseful scene where Madonna, who is afraid of the dark, is alone at dead of night when an intruder blows out her candle flame. I liked the descriptions of the artistic household of Valentine Blyth; and there are some good comic set-pieces. But also, rather tediously, there is quite a lot of female and familial piety, which Collins assumes will interest and absorb the reader much more than it does.