Fiction · 1873
The New Magdalen
Mercy Merrick, a former prostitute turned Red Cross nurse on the Franco-Prussian War's front lines, takes the identity of a fellow Englishwoman believed killed in a shell burst, and returns to London to build a new, respectable life under a name that isn't hers — until the woman she thought dead turns out to be very much alive.
Wilkie Collins published The New Magdalen in 1873, adapting it himself for the stage the same year; both versions provoked controversy for asking readers to sympathize with a "fallen woman" heroine rather than simply punish her.
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Contents
- Dedication
- Preamble
- Chapter I — The Two Women
- Chapter II — Magdalen—In Modern Times
- Chapter III — The German Shell
- Chapter IV — The Temptation
- Chapter V — The German Surgeon
- Preamble
- Chapter VI — Lady Janet’s Companion
- Chapter VII — The Man Is Coming
- Chapter VIII — The Man Appears
- Chapter IX — News from Mannheim
- Chapter X — A Council of Three
- Chapter XI — The Dead Alive
- Chapter XII — Exit Julian
- Chapter XIII — Enter Julian
- Chapter XIV — Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before
- Chapter XV — A Woman’s Remorse
- Chapter XVI — They Meet Again
- Chapter XVII — The Guardian Angel
- Chapter XVIII — The Search in the Grounds
- Chapter XIX — The Evil Genius
- Chapter XX — The Policeman in Plain Clothes
- Chapter XXI — The Footstep in the Corridor
- Chapter XXII — The Man in the Dining-Room
- Chapter XXIII — Lady Janet at Bay
- Chapter XXIV — Lady Janet’s Letter
- Chapter XXV — The Confession
- Chapter XXVI — Great Heart and Little Heart
- Chapter XXVII — Magdalen’s Apprenticeship
- Chapter XXVIII — Sentence Is Pronounced on Her
- Chapter XXIX — The Last Trial
- Epilogue
- Chapter I — From Mr. Horace Holmcroft to Miss Grace Roseberry
- Chapter II — From Miss Grace Roseberry to Mr. Horace Holmcroft
- Chapter III — From Mr. Horace Holmcroft to Miss Grace Roseberry
- Chapter IV — Extracts from the Diary of the Reverend Julian Gray
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1824–1889 · Victorian
Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was born in Marylebone, London, the son of the landscape painter William Collins, and spent much of his boyhood in Italy and France before working as a clerk for a tea merchant and studying law at Lincoln's Inn, to which he was called in 1851 without ever practicing. His first novel, Antonina, appeared in 1850; the next year he met Charles Dickens, and the two became close friends and frequent collaborators, co-writing several Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round together, among them The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856), The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857) and, in 1867, No Thoroughfare. Collins's own novels, many first serialized in Dickens's magazines, include The Woman in White (1859–60), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868), often ranked among the first detective novels in English. He never married but lived for decades with Caroline Graves and her daughter, while also maintaining a second household with Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children; gout and a lifelong dependence on laudanum for the pain marked his later years. He died in London.
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