The Moonstone:
The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century British epistolary novel, generally considered the first full length detective novel in the English language. The story was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round. The Moonstone and The Woman in White are widely considered Wilkie Collins' best novels. Besides creating many of the ground rules of the detective novel, The Moonstone also reflected Collins' enlightened social attitudes in his treatment of the servants in the novel. Collins adapted The Moonstone for the stage in 1877, but the production was performed for only two months.
The Moonstone: As a Victorian Novel
When Jane Eyre (1847) was published by Charlotte Brontë under the masculine pseudonym Currer Bell, it was received with great acclaim by some critics, and harsh criticism by others. The conservative Lady Eastlake suggested that if the book was by a woman ‘she had long forfeited the society of her own sex’. In addition to this lack of femininity, she also diagnosed a spirit of rebellion which she likened to the working class uprisings of the Chartists, with their demands for votes for the working people, and also the political revolutions which were then sweeping across Europe. Jane Eyre unsettled views as to how women should act and behave, suggesting, in Lady Eastlake’s eyes, almost an overthrowing of social order. Unlike the long-suffering heroines in Charlotte Brontë’s early writings, who pine away for the dashing, promiscuous Duke of Zamorna, Jane demands equality and respect. ‘Do you think’, she demands of Rochester, ‘I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings?’. She speaks to him as one spirit to another, ‘equal – as we are’ (ch. 23).