Hide And Seek Or The Mystery Of Mary Grice

At the centre of Hide and Seek (1854) a secret waits to be revealed. Why should the apparently respectable painter Valentine Blyth refuse to account for the presence in his household of the beautiful girl known as Madonna? It is not until his young friend Zack Thorpe, who is in rebellion against his repressive father, gets into bad company and meets a mysterious stranger that the secret of Madonna can be unravelled. Wilkie Collins's third novel, dedicated to his life-long friend Dickens, is a story in which excitement is combined with charm and humour. In its mixture of the everyday and the extraordinary, Hide and Seek forms a bridge between the domestic novel and the sensational fiction for which Collins later became famous.

In this gripping yarn by the great Victorian storyteller, a strange and wild woodsman investigates a gentle young woman's mysterious origins. A warm, entertaining tale that blends domestic comedy, pathos, humor, and a touch of social protest, this novel was praised by Charles Dickens as "a very remarkable book."

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