Basil

Wilkie Collins wrote this dark tale of obsession early in his career, before the triumphs that made his name. Basil, the younger son of a proud aristocratic family, glimpses a linen-draper’s daughter on an omnibus and is consumed by desire. He marries Margaret Sherwin in secret, agreeing to her father’s strange demand that the couple live apart for a year. When the sinister clerk Mannion enters the household, that fragile arrangement collapses into betrayal, violence, and a hunger for revenge that pushes Basil toward ruin. Collins probes class, sexual longing, and the thin line between passion and madness with a frankness that unsettled Victorian readers. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings his provocative early novel to new readers.