The Moonstone

What It's About

The Moonstone follows a huge yellow diamond, looted from an Indian shrine at the siege of Seringapatam in 1799 and bequeathed to young Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday. That same night it vanishes from her family's Yorkshire country house. Sergeant Cuff, a celebrated London detective, is called in. Suspicion falls on several members of the household and its guests, including Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, the housekeeper's maid Rosanna Spearman and the charming philanthropist Godfrey Ablewhite. Three mysterious Indian visitors are also hanging around the estate. The story is told through a series of first-person accounts by different narrators, among them the devoted old steward Gabriel Betteredge, the sanctimonious Miss Clack and the lawyer Mr Bruff. Each gives only part of the picture, and the reader has to piece the truth together.

Key Concepts

The novel is often credited with establishing the template of the English detective story: the country-house crime, the red herrings, the gifted but fallible investigator and the gradual reconstruction of events. Its multiple-narrator structure gives each voice its own humour, bias and blind spots, so unreliable testimony becomes part of the puzzle. Beneath the mystery it also deals with British imperialism and the colonial plunder that sets the plot in motion, and with the limits of Victorian respectability. Its portrayal of the Indian characters has drawn mixed readings, from a sympathetic critique of empire to a product of its period's attitudes. T. S. Eliot praised it as the first and best of the modern English detective novels.

About the Author

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright, a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, and one of the leading figures of the Victorian sensation novel. He was known for intricate plotting, unconventional private views on marriage and morality, and a long struggle with painful illness.