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Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Oxford University Press (2016), Edition: Reprint, 304 pages
Description
Classic Literature. Fiction. HTML: If you like your mysteries with a liberal dash of prurient gossip and high-society drama, be sure to add Wilkie Collins' Jezebel's Daughter to your must-read list. This tautly suspenseful tale full of betrayal and unexpected plot twists is a worthy diversion..
User reviews
LibraryThing member atimco
Jezebel's Daughter, published in 1880, is a Victorian thriller from that master of the genre, Wilkie Collins. In this story, plot is a much stronger driving force than the big idea that generally dominates Collins' books. The overarching theme in this tale is the psychology of an evil woman and a
There isn't much to spoiler; the title pretty much tells you who the villain is. Two men — one a brilliant chemist, the other a shrewd businessman — die on the same day, leaving their wives a mixed legacy. Madame Fontaine, the widow of the chemist, is left with the poisons he was researching (wow, I wonder what she's going to do with those!), while Mrs. Wagner is left with her husband's mental health institution reforms and his plans for hiring women along with men in his firm's offices. The story is narrated by Mrs. Wagner's nephew David Glenney, and supplemented with extracts from the letters and diaries of various characters. Collins does love his different narrative voices, doesn't he?
Considering the predominance of plot over idea in Jezebel's Daughter, one would think that the characters would have a much stronger presence as unique individuals than do Collins' characters in his more theme-driven works. But this is not the case. Oh, there are certainly some fun characters here: Jack Straw is a fascinating portrait of mental instability, with his funny ways and insuperable vanity. But besides him, everyone else is pretty much standard fare: the young, idealistic lovers, the suspicious (but sometimes oh so daft!) narrator, the evil, charming female schemer, the stern man of business, the erudite, naive chemist, etc. These are all types that Collins does very well, but they do suffer somewhat from being done so very often.
As always in Collins' books, the reader is treated to slices of Victorian life mixed with a heavy dose of melodrama — even a resurrection from the dead! You really have to love the stageyness of it all to survive and thrive whilst reading a Wilkie Collins novel. Fortunately I do love it, all that glorious, messy, over-the-top culmination of human emotions brought about by a highly coincidental set of circumstances. It's just fun. But I can see many readers losing patience with the elaborate set-up all leading to a most predictable shock.
It is generally accepted that Collins' later works are weaker than his earlier successes on almost every level, and Jezebel's Daughter, though by no means dreadful, is no exception. It's really more of a middling title amidst his repertoire. Still, for sheer entertainment value, Collins is one of my favorite authors. Readers interested in Victorian methods of dealing with the insane, steps toward labor equality, and the age-old fascination with the Jezebel villainess will find much to enjoy here.
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study of the forces (maternal instincts, in this case) that both cause and check her wickedness. Can Jezebel's daughter redeem Jezebel... or is she the reason for her mother's evil?There isn't much to spoiler; the title pretty much tells you who the villain is. Two men — one a brilliant chemist, the other a shrewd businessman — die on the same day, leaving their wives a mixed legacy. Madame Fontaine, the widow of the chemist, is left with the poisons he was researching (wow, I wonder what she's going to do with those!), while Mrs. Wagner is left with her husband's mental health institution reforms and his plans for hiring women along with men in his firm's offices. The story is narrated by Mrs. Wagner's nephew David Glenney, and supplemented with extracts from the letters and diaries of various characters. Collins does love his different narrative voices, doesn't he?
Considering the predominance of plot over idea in Jezebel's Daughter, one would think that the characters would have a much stronger presence as unique individuals than do Collins' characters in his more theme-driven works. But this is not the case. Oh, there are certainly some fun characters here: Jack Straw is a fascinating portrait of mental instability, with his funny ways and insuperable vanity. But besides him, everyone else is pretty much standard fare: the young, idealistic lovers, the suspicious (but sometimes oh so daft!) narrator, the evil, charming female schemer, the stern man of business, the erudite, naive chemist, etc. These are all types that Collins does very well, but they do suffer somewhat from being done so very often.
As always in Collins' books, the reader is treated to slices of Victorian life mixed with a heavy dose of melodrama — even a resurrection from the dead! You really have to love the stageyness of it all to survive and thrive whilst reading a Wilkie Collins novel. Fortunately I do love it, all that glorious, messy, over-the-top culmination of human emotions brought about by a highly coincidental set of circumstances. It's just fun. But I can see many readers losing patience with the elaborate set-up all leading to a most predictable shock.
It is generally accepted that Collins' later works are weaker than his earlier successes on almost every level, and Jezebel's Daughter, though by no means dreadful, is no exception. It's really more of a middling title amidst his repertoire. Still, for sheer entertainment value, Collins is one of my favorite authors. Readers interested in Victorian methods of dealing with the insane, steps toward labor equality, and the age-old fascination with the Jezebel villainess will find much to enjoy here.
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LibraryThing member countrylife
Ah, the innocent love between man and maiden. What matters it that the man’s father is rich and above reproach, and the maiden’s mother is a poor widow and suspected of evil doings.
Who among us knows the capacity for wickedness that lies dormant in our natures, until the fatal event comes and
This was my first Wilkie Collins, and I thoroughly enjoyed his story and his characters. Although you know “whodunit” from the title, and from the early pages, you know the “how”, the story runs its course and takes you along for a ride in an 1880s suspense novel.
Who among us knows the capacity for wickedness that lies dormant in our natures, until the fatal event comes and
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calls it forth.This was my first Wilkie Collins, and I thoroughly enjoyed his story and his characters. Although you know “whodunit” from the title, and from the early pages, you know the “how”, the story runs its course and takes you along for a ride in an 1880s suspense novel.
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LibraryThing member devenish
I simply love Wilkie Collins style of writing and have indeed read most of his works with great pleasure. I have not come across this particular story before however. It is a tale of Madame Fontaine and her innocent daughter Minna. The mother is a strong minded woman who is ambitious for her
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daughter and will stop at nothing to place her in a safe and settled position in life. To this end she will lie and steal,indeed she is prepared to commit murder to achieve her ambitions.Quite simply ,brilliant. Show Less
LibraryThing member Stevil2001
‘I can understand the murderess becoming morally intoxicated with the sense of her own tremendous power. A mere human creature—only a woman, Julie!—armed with the means of secretly dealing death around her, wherever she goes—meeting with strangers who displease her, looking at them quietly,
I read this book afraid it would contain a female scientist. Not only have I previously published a claim that that was first done in a later novel, but that later novel was also by Wilkie Collins; it seems rather embarrassing to overlook one Collins novel in the rush to establish the importance of another. Somehow, I did not hear of this novel until much more recently. I am safe, however. Jezebel's Daughter is about a woman using scientifically created poisons, but she herself did not create them. Madame Fontaine's late husband was a genius chemist, but she can do nothing more than follow the directions for administering and curing poison he left behind; she cannot even create more of them.
Professor Fontaine dies on the first page of the novel, however, meaning that there is nothing here that will really factor into my project on fictional Victorian scientists. What we hear of him, though, bears many traces of the stereotypical scientist. Madame Fontaine at first loved her husband, and pinned her hopes on him having a distinguished career, but even though he was a medical doctor, he gave it up for a life of experimental science, which had much less social possibility. She bemoans to a friend, "you have married a Man! Happy woman! I am married to a Machine" (75). At the height of his ambition, he becomes what she calls an "Animated Mummy," so lean and dirty is he as he neglects almost everything in his pursuit of chemical discoveries (75).
There's also a Hungarian chemist, never named, but described as "the most extraordinary experimental chemist living" and "[t]he new Paracelsus" (74). He's the one who bequeaths the formulas for the poisons to Professor Fontaine, and he's the one who inspires Professor Fontaine to sink his whole career into experimental chemistry. But he commits suicide, seemingly for scientifically logical reasons: "After giving it a fair trial, I find that life is not worth living for. I have decided to destroy myself with a poison of my own discovery. [...] [M]y body is presented as a free gift to the anatomy school. Let a committee of surgeons and analysts examine my remains. I defy them to discover a trace of the drug that has killed me" (76). He feels like a forerunner for Doctor Nathan Benjulia in Heart and Science (1882-83), a vaguely foreign, sinister, Godless presence lurking at the margins of the novel and enabling some of its darkest moments, but not directly involved in the main plot. (Unlike in Heart and Science, where the villainous Mrs. Gallilee admires Benjulia, Madame Fontaine plainly disapproves of the Hungarian.)
This novel also feels like a forerunner for Heart and Science in its exploration of female villainy. Like Mrs. Gallilee, Madame Fontaine is a strange mix of femininity and anti-femininity. She departs from social mores, but one sense the novel doesn't entirely disapprove of her: it's set in 1828, but narrated retrospectively from the time of publication (1879-80), and the narrator occasionally comments that things were different for women then, they had less options. (The narrator's aunt is the director of a trading company that employs many women, and this is figured as unusual.) So when Madame Fontaine poisons people, you can kind of understand where she's coming from in a society often arrayed against women, as the epigraph above reveals, or the following delightfully villainous speech: "Power! […] The power that I have dream of all my life is mine at last! Alone among mortal creatures, I have Life and Death for my servants. […] What a position! I stand here, a dweller in a popular city—and every creature in it, from highest to lowest, is a creature in my power!" (145)
Like Mrs. Gallilee, Madame Fontaine is pursuing motherly ends through un-motherly means. She simply wants her daughter to be happy-- but is willing to stop at nothing to make it happen. But also like Mrs. Gallilee, she's often obsessed with the appearance of propriety over actual propriety; she refuses to moderate her spending when the family coffers begin running low, insisting it is simply not done, and she must live in the manner to which she has become accustomed. It is a monstrous femininity, its strengths and weaknesses all magnified to dangerous proportions. If you've already read Heart and Science, then, Jezebel's Daughter very much comes across as the dry run for it; in a sense, Heart and Science just takes the husband's scientific sensibility and transfers it to his wife; Mrs. Gallilee is everything Madame Fontaine is with the addition of seeing like a scientist.
Jezebel's Daughter is like Heart and Science in one final way: it is very much minor Collins. There's none of the thrills or mysteries of The Woman in White or The Moonstone or No Name to be found here. It has its moments, but Collins can do better.
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and saying to herself, “I doom you to die, before you are a day older”’ (77)I read this book afraid it would contain a female scientist. Not only have I previously published a claim that that was first done in a later novel, but that later novel was also by Wilkie Collins; it seems rather embarrassing to overlook one Collins novel in the rush to establish the importance of another. Somehow, I did not hear of this novel until much more recently. I am safe, however. Jezebel's Daughter is about a woman using scientifically created poisons, but she herself did not create them. Madame Fontaine's late husband was a genius chemist, but she can do nothing more than follow the directions for administering and curing poison he left behind; she cannot even create more of them.
Professor Fontaine dies on the first page of the novel, however, meaning that there is nothing here that will really factor into my project on fictional Victorian scientists. What we hear of him, though, bears many traces of the stereotypical scientist. Madame Fontaine at first loved her husband, and pinned her hopes on him having a distinguished career, but even though he was a medical doctor, he gave it up for a life of experimental science, which had much less social possibility. She bemoans to a friend, "you have married a Man! Happy woman! I am married to a Machine" (75). At the height of his ambition, he becomes what she calls an "Animated Mummy," so lean and dirty is he as he neglects almost everything in his pursuit of chemical discoveries (75).
There's also a Hungarian chemist, never named, but described as "the most extraordinary experimental chemist living" and "[t]he new Paracelsus" (74). He's the one who bequeaths the formulas for the poisons to Professor Fontaine, and he's the one who inspires Professor Fontaine to sink his whole career into experimental chemistry. But he commits suicide, seemingly for scientifically logical reasons: "After giving it a fair trial, I find that life is not worth living for. I have decided to destroy myself with a poison of my own discovery. [...] [M]y body is presented as a free gift to the anatomy school. Let a committee of surgeons and analysts examine my remains. I defy them to discover a trace of the drug that has killed me" (76). He feels like a forerunner for Doctor Nathan Benjulia in Heart and Science (1882-83), a vaguely foreign, sinister, Godless presence lurking at the margins of the novel and enabling some of its darkest moments, but not directly involved in the main plot. (Unlike in Heart and Science, where the villainous Mrs. Gallilee admires Benjulia, Madame Fontaine plainly disapproves of the Hungarian.)
This novel also feels like a forerunner for Heart and Science in its exploration of female villainy. Like Mrs. Gallilee, Madame Fontaine is a strange mix of femininity and anti-femininity. She departs from social mores, but one sense the novel doesn't entirely disapprove of her: it's set in 1828, but narrated retrospectively from the time of publication (1879-80), and the narrator occasionally comments that things were different for women then, they had less options. (The narrator's aunt is the director of a trading company that employs many women, and this is figured as unusual.) So when Madame Fontaine poisons people, you can kind of understand where she's coming from in a society often arrayed against women, as the epigraph above reveals, or the following delightfully villainous speech: "Power! […] The power that I have dream of all my life is mine at last! Alone among mortal creatures, I have Life and Death for my servants. […] What a position! I stand here, a dweller in a popular city—and every creature in it, from highest to lowest, is a creature in my power!" (145)
Like Mrs. Gallilee, Madame Fontaine is pursuing motherly ends through un-motherly means. She simply wants her daughter to be happy-- but is willing to stop at nothing to make it happen. But also like Mrs. Gallilee, she's often obsessed with the appearance of propriety over actual propriety; she refuses to moderate her spending when the family coffers begin running low, insisting it is simply not done, and she must live in the manner to which she has become accustomed. It is a monstrous femininity, its strengths and weaknesses all magnified to dangerous proportions. If you've already read Heart and Science, then, Jezebel's Daughter very much comes across as the dry run for it; in a sense, Heart and Science just takes the husband's scientific sensibility and transfers it to his wife; Mrs. Gallilee is everything Madame Fontaine is with the addition of seeing like a scientist.
Jezebel's Daughter is like Heart and Science in one final way: it is very much minor Collins. There's none of the thrills or mysteries of The Woman in White or The Moonstone or No Name to be found here. It has its moments, but Collins can do better.
Show Less
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1880
Physical description
304 p.; 7.7 inches
ISBN
019870321X / 9780198703211