Reviews for Embarrassments

The average rating for Embarrassments based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-16 00:00:00 Hursell Dolly I read the edition provided free from Kindle under the anthology title "Greatest Mystery Collection". This is a collection of six short stories and novellas, of varying length and quality, all of which had previously appeared in periodical form except for "The Lady of Glenworth Grange". The stories are embedded in a fairly extended apparatus, consisting of formal introductions to each story, including character sketches of the supposed narrators, by a fictitious portrait artist taking a rest for his ill eyes, and diary entries from the artist's wife, giving the human touch and telling the story of her husband's illness and her own inspiration that he could sell said stories to make ends meet. Collins is a decent writer and he gets away with this hodge-podge quite convincingly. Here's a quick rundown of the embedded stories. (1) A Terribly Strange Bed. A short but nice piece of gruesome urban Gothic, tapping into a fear that would have occurred far oftener to Collins' readers: being suffocated by a four-poster bed! (In a gambling den, of course!) (2) A Stolen Letter. This is a forgettable story, told in a rather arch tone by a lawyer who clearly aspires to be a detective, about his adventures finding a blackmailing letter under a carpet, using an obscure clue about the carpet pattern. (3) Sister Rose. This is a French Revolution novella - long and fairly gripping - centred around a brother and a sister who makes a bad marriage to a man who rises to some power within the first years of the Terror. The husband ends up denouncing (deliberately) the brother and (accidentally) the sister, but there is a character, not a conventionally attractive one, who gets them out of their situation and becomes a close friend. I was going to say there were definite influences of Tale of Two Cities here, both in the milieu and in the characterization, but I see that this novella predates Dickens' novel by several years. Given that the novella first appeared in a Dickens periodical, I don't think you could deny there was likely some cross-fertilization going on. For this story more than some of the others, by the way, the connection to the embedding narrative is tenuous in the extreme. (4) The Lady of Glenwith Grange. A solitary woman in a large house - therefore odd by definition - proves to have a traumatic past, having lost her purpose in life, which was looking after her spoiled younger sister Rosamond. Rosamond married an impostor aristocrat, and then died giving birth to his brain-damaged daughter. She is, however, civil and sociable to her occasional visitors, and benevolent in her works, and therefore not quite in the league of solitary damaged women in big houses like Miss Havisham or Rochester's mad wife. (5) The Nun's Story of Gabriel's Marriage. Set in France, this is again rather Gothic. Gabriel, the middle generation in a fishing family, finds out that his father Francois once attempted murder of a young visitor, and dumped his body in a local smuggling cache. What neither Gabriel nor Francois knows is that young man survived, became a notable priest, and returned to make his peace with Francois. He tells his story to first to Gabriel, whose conscience is plaguing him about going ahead with his marriage to Perrine, while being the son of a murderer. The priest's virtue (and he eventually wins Francois over to confession and repentance, off stage) therefore solves Gabriel's problem as well as the one of a generation before. The Gothic aspect is in the tone, the violent storms which herald major events, and superstitions driving people's actions. (6) The Yellow Mask. This is another story that is long enough to deserve the description of novella. It is set (mostly) in good society in France, and again told in a rather arch tone. A sculptor has three sitters: his daughter, who is attractive; Brigida, a mercenary millliner who is none too scrupulous; and Nannina, a young and good girl, beloved of the young aristocrat at whom they all set their caps. The sculptor has a priest for a brother, and the priest schemes to manage the marriage by arranging for his brother's daughter to marry the aristocrat and getting the young Nannina out of the way. His motive is to gain (or, in his mind, regain) money that he believes the aristocrat owes to the Church. However, his influence wanes when the sculptor's daughter dies young. At this point, the priest, who is also a sculptor on the side, creates an elaborate plot to play on the young man's superstitions and prevent his remarriage for love to Nannina. Hence the yellow mask, worn by Brigida, but created by the priest by taking a cast from the statue of the daughter. The climax of the plot, with the young man being chased from room to room in a big society masked ball by a woman he believes to be the ghost of his dead wife, is delightfully silly. I felt Collins extended the explanations and denouement of this one rather too long; perhaps he had a word count to meet! Good fun, and I look forward to attacking more of the lesser-known Wilkie Collins in this collection.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-18 00:00:00 JJ Stubbs Free download available at Project Gutenberg PREFACE TO "AFTER DARK." I have taken some pains to string together the various stories contained in this Volume on a single thread of interest, which, so far as I know, has at least the merit of not having been used before. The pages entitled "Leah's Diary" are, however, intended to fulfill another purpose besides that of serving as the frame-work for my collection of tales. In this part of the book, and subsequently in the Prologues to the stories, it has been my object to give the reader one more glimpse at that artist-life which circumstances have afforded me peculiar opportunities of studying, and which I have already tried to represent, under another aspect, in my fiction, "Hide-and-Seek." This time I wish to ask some sympathy for the joys and sorrows of a poor traveling portrait-painter'presented from his wife's point of view in "Leah's Diary," and supposed to be briefly and simply narrated by himself in the Prologues to the stories. I have purposely kept these two portions of the book within certain limits; only giving, in the one case, as much as the wife might naturally write in her diary at intervals of household leisure; and, in the other, as much as a modest and sensible man would be likely to say about himself and about the characters he met with in his wanderings. If I have been so fortunate as to make my idea intelligible by this brief and simple mode of treatment, and if I have, at the same time, achieved the necessary object of gathering several separate stories together as neatly-fitting parts of one complete whole, I shall have succeeded in a design which I have for some time past been very anxious creditably to fulfill. Of the tales themselves, taken individually, I have only to say, by way of necessary explanation, that "The Lady of Glenwith Grange" is now offered to the reader for the first time; and that the other stories have appeared in the columns of Household Words. My best thanks are due to Mr. Charles Dickens for his kindness in allowing me to set them in their present frame-work. I must also gratefully acknowledge an obligation of another kind to the accomplished artist, Mr. W. S. Herrick, to whom I am indebted for the curious and interesting facts on which the tales of "The Terribly Strange Bed" and "The Yellow Mask" are founded. Although the statement may appear somewhat superfluous to those who know me, it may not be out of place to add, in conclusion, that these stories are entirely of my own imagining, constructing, and writing. The fact that the events of some of my tales occur on foreign ground, and are acted out by foreign personages, appears to have suggested in some quarters the inference that the stories themselves might be of foreign origin. Let me, once for all, assure any readers who may honor me with their attention, that in this, and in all other cases, they may depend on the genuineness of my literary offspring. The little children of my brain may be weakly enough, and may be sadly in want of a helping hand to aid them in their first attempts at walking on the stage of this great world; but, at any rate, they are not borrowed children. The members of my own literary family are indeed increasing so fast as to render the very idea of borrowing quite out of the question, and to suggest serious apprehension that I may not have done adding to the large book-population, on my own sole responsibility, even yet.