Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins's Books(25)
The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice
Literature When the Countess Narona meets Agnes Lockwood, the woman jilted by her fiancé, she feels a great sense of foreboding. After Countess Narona's marriage, she moves with her husband, Lord Montbarry, to Venice. There, disowned by his family, the lord apparently becomes a recluse and falls fatally ill. As much as Agnes tries to forget the episode of her broken engagement, her fate and that of the countess seem to be inextricably woven. Both are relentlessly drawn to the Palace Hotel in Venice for a final and dramatic encounter in the room where more than past emotions resurface to haunt them.
Loosely based on a case from the annals of French crime, the scene, scenery, players, conflicts, and especially the horror of this mystery come through the invention of one of our classic novelists. Antonina; Or, The Fall of Rome
Literature A romance of the fifth century, in which many of the scenes described in the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' are reset to suit the purpose of the author. Only two historical personages are introduced into the story,– the Emperor Honorius, and Alaric the Goth; and these attain only a secondary importance. Among the historical incidents used are the arrival of the Goths at the gates of Rome, the Famine, the last efforts of the besieged, the Treaty of Peace, the introduction of the Dragon of Brass, and the collection of the ransom. Our heroine Antonina, a very young Roman maiden, flees her father and an amorous patrician neighbor, into the arms of a young, handsome, gentle, sympathetic Goth. This book does not show the intricacy of plot and clever construction of the author's modern society stories; but it is full of action, vivid in color, and sufficiently close to history to convey a dramatic sense of the Rome of Honorius and the closing-in of the barbarians. 
