Name: the legacy of cain
SKU: 19038053
Price: 31.39 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Collins, Wilkie
ISBN: 9780809594856

Type

Physical Book

Author

Wilkie Collins

Publisher

Wildside Press

Year

2004

Language

English

Pages

324

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9x15.2x1.9 cm

Weight

0.48 kg.

ISBN

0809594854

ISBN13

9780809594856

Synopsis "the legacy of cain"

The first of the events which I must now relate was the conviction of The Prisoner for the murder of her husband. They had lived together in matrimony for little more than two years. The husband, a gentleman by birth and education, had mortally offended his relations in marrying a woman of an inferior rank of life. He was fast declining into a state of poverty, through his own reckless extravagance, at the time when he met with his death at his wife's hand. Without attempting to excuse him, he deserved, to my mind, some tribute of regret. It is not to be denied that he was profligate in his habits and violent in his temper. But it is equally true that he was affectionate in the domestic circle, and, when moved by wisely applied remonstrance, sincerely penitent for sins committed under temptation that overpowered him. If his wife had killed him in a fit of jealous rage -- under provocation, be it remembered, which the witnesses proved -- she might have been convicted of manslaughter, and might have received a light sentence. But the evidence so undeniably revealed deliberate and merciless premeditation, that the only defense attempted by her counsel was madness, and the only alternative left to a righteous jury was a verdict which condemned the woman to death. Those mischievous members of the community, whose topsy-turvy sympathies feel for the living criminal and forget the dead victim, attempted to save her by means of high-flown petitions and contemptible correspondence in the newspapers. But the Judge held firm; and the Home Secretary held firm. They were entirely right; and the public were scandalously wrong. . . .

Wilkie Collins

(Author)

View Author's Page

(London 1824-1889) Playwright, novelist, and prolific short story writer. At 17, he started working at a tea trading company while writing Ioláni, or Tahiti as it was (Gothic no. 32), a work that was not published until over a century after his death. He studied Law and, although he never practiced, he did use his legal knowledge in many of his works, and critics consider him one of the fathers of the detective genre. In 1851, he met Charles Dickens, with whom he formed a deep friendship and published his main works in his weekly All the Year Around. After Dickens' death in 1870, his popularity waned. He suffered from rheumatic gout which eventually led to an opium addiction. His tombstone epitaph highlights him as the author of the novel The Woman in White.

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