No Name (1862) - Wilkie Collins Audiobook

Written by Wilkie Collins
Read by Nicholas Boulton, Rachel Atkins, Russell Bentley, John Foley, David Rintoul, Lucy Scott
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

• Length: 27 hrs and 20 mins
• Release date: 05-07-20
• Publisher: Naxos AudioBooks

‘Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance’

Magdalen and Norah Vanstone have known only comfort and affluence for their entire lives. Orphaned suddenly following the unexpected deaths of their parents, the illegitimate sisters find themselves flung into the other extreme of living: their father had neglected to amend his will following their parents’ recent marriage, leaving them with nothing, and their bitter, estranged uncle, the legal inheritor of the family fortune, mercilessly refuses them support.

They have no money, no rights and no name. Norah, the elder of the two, looks for work as a governess and accepts her fate. Fiery and headstrong Magdalen, however, does not. She vows revenge and schemes a series of traps to recover the fortune, no matter the cost….Magdalen Vanstone struggles to reclaim her identity, the plot uncovers many a moral, social and legal skeleton in the cupboards of Victorian society.

Mercurial and unscrupulous, Magdalen is Wilkie Collins’s most exhilarating heroine, one of the rare subversives in Victorian fiction and a woman dazzlingly versatile in her powers of self-transformation. Through her, with great comic vigour, No Name exposes how social identity is constructed, and how it can be dismantled, buried, borrowed or invented.

The story is told in eight major parts, called Scenes. Each Scene is divided into chapters numbered consecutively within the scene. The end of each Scene has a Between the Scenes containing letter, news article to further the story. I have numbered the contents within each Scene as well as the entire book. I hope it is coherent or as coherent as a Wilkie Collins novel can be.

Scene One begins in 1846, at Combe-Raven in West Somerset, the country residence of the wealthy Vanstone family: Andrew Vanstone, his wife, and their two daughters

Scene Two is set in York, where Magdalen is found by Captain Wragge, a distant relative of her mother’s. He helps her in getting started on the stage.

Scene Three is in Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth. Magdalen, having earned some money, forsakes the stage and plots to get her inheritance back.

Scene Four is in Aldborough, Suffolk, where Magdalen tries to carry out her plot to regain her inheritance by marrying Noel Vanstone under an assumed name,

Scene Five is in Baliol Cottage, Dumfries. Noel is alone, as his wife has left to visit friends in London. Mrs. Lecount is back from Zurich and explains who his wife really is,

Scene Six is in St John’s Wood where Magdalen has lodgings. Estranged from Norah and from Miss Garth, who she thinks betrayed her husband’s whereabouts to Lecount, she conceives a plot to disguise herself as a parlour maid and infiltrate Admiral Bartram’s house

Scene Seven is at St. Crux, the Bartram country house. Magdalen, serving as a parlour maid under Louisa’s name for Admiral Bartram, searches through the house for the Secret Trust.

The Last Scene is set in a poor lodging house, Aaron’s Building. Magdalen is ill and destitute……There is a semi-happy ending to the book.