The Moonstone (Signet Classics)

William Wilkie Collins (1824­–89) was born in London. He was educated for the law, but instead became a writer, achieving great popularity with such novels as The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and his masterpiece, The Moonstone (1868). His life, both personal and professional, was profoundly affected by his friendship with Charles Dickens, who helped guide and ardently championed Collins’s writing, and whose work in turn was stimulated by Collins’s use of mystery and suspense. Though increasingly handicapped by a painful disease and by dependence on opiates used for relief, Collins continued to produce novels until three years before his death.
 
Alev Lytle Croutier, whose books have been translated into twenty-one languages, is the only woman novelist from Turkey to be published extensively worldwide. She is the author of the international bestseller Harem: The World Behind the Veil, novels such as The Palace of Tears and Seven Houses, and, for young readers, American Girl’s Leyla: The Black Tulip. The founding editor and editor-in-chief of Mercury House publishing company, she lectures frequently at universities, museums, and conferences.
 
Lillian Nayder is Professor of English at Bates College, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British fiction. She is the author of Wilkie Collins (1997) and Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (2002). With Graham Law, she coedits the Wilkie Collins Society Journal.