The New Magdalen

A Question of Who One Is Allowed to Be

Wilkie Collins

• Publisher: Aeneas Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9785486110498
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Two women are alone in a French farmhouse in the war of 1870 — a lady of good family and a woman out of a reformatory — and a shell falls. One survives, and takes the other's name and her place in a great English house. Collins wrote this in 1873, and the fashionable world was scandalised: the point of the book is that the reformed woman is better than the people who will not have her, and he says so in the plainest terms he ever used. Fifty-three plates of painting, from Edvard Munch to Édouard Manet, catch the passing world of the 1870s — terraces, canals, soldiers and farmhouses — the very scenes this story of borrowed lives moves through.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Chapter I. The Two Women
• Chapter II. Magdalen—In Modern Times
• Chapter III. The German Shell
• Chapter IV. The Temptation
• Chapter V. The German Surgeon
• Second Scene.—Mablethorpe House
• Chapter VI. Lady Janet’s Companion
• Chapter VII. The Man Is Coming
• Chapter VIII. The Man Appears
• Chapter IX. News from Mannheim
• Chapter X. A Council of Three
• Chapter XI. The Dead Alive
• Chapter XII. Exit Julian
• Chapter XIII. Enter Julian
• Chapter XIV. Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before
• Chapter XV. A Woman’s Remorse
• Chapter XVI. They Meet Again
• Chapter XVII. The Guardian Angel
• Chapter XVIII. The Search in the Grounds
• Chapter XIX. The Evil Genius
• Chapter XX. The Policeman in Plain Clothes
• Chapter XXI. The Footstep in the Corridor
• Chapter XXII. The Man in the Dining-Room
• Chapter XXIII. Lady Janet at Bay
• Chapter XXIV. Lady Janet’s Letter
• Chapter XXV. The Confession
• Chapter XXVI. Great Heart and Little Heart
• Chapter XXVII. Magdalen’s Apprenticeship
• Chapter XXVIII. Sentence Is Pronounced on Her
• Chapter XXIX. The Last Trial
• Epilogue:
• About the Author