Hide and Seek (1857) - Wilkie Collins

Written by Wilkie Collins
Read by Nicholas Boulton
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

· Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
· Release date: 01-08-22
· Publisher: Naxos AudioBooks

The girl named Mary — they called her Madonna, and she was deaf and dumb and beautiful as a painting by Raphael — was a mystery.

The Blyths adopted her from a kindly old woman connected to a traveling circus, but everyone knew she wasn’t from circus folk. All they did know about her identity was that she’d lost her hearing in an accident, and the proprietor of the circus had treated her horribly, and, and . . . and in her cache of secret personal private things, she owned one thing as precious to her as life itself: a bracelet made of brown human hair with the initials MG tied into it. The Blyths kept it locked in a bureau for fear that Mary’s unknown family might one day claim her… But it is only when Blyth’s friend Zack Thorpe rebels against his disciplinarian father and falls into bad company that the secret of Madonna is revealed.

Appearing in 1854, Hide and Seek was Wilkie Collins’s third published novel.

Combining charm and excitement, Hide and Seek is presented in two halves: the first is leisurely while the second picks up the pace and is more like Collins’s later sensational fiction.

In the Introduction to the Dover edition of the book, the American Collins’ biographer, Nuel Pharr Davis, claims that the prologue, as well as long passages of “The Hiding“ are “consistently and indiscreetly autobiographical.” If so, the young Wilkie experienced a rather grim Victorian childhood under a strictly religious father. The Intro also asserts Collins was probably emboldened to do this because of his friendship with Charles Dickens who had recently written his own semi-autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. Collins dedicates his novel to Dickens.

Hide and Seek is persuasively delivered by Nicholas Boulton, who has read several of Collins’s novels, including No Name, Armadale, The Dead Secret, and Man and Wife.