Synopsis "The Black Robe"

The Black Robe is an 1881 epistolary ( series of letters) novel by famous English writer, Wilkie Collins. The book relates the adversities of Lewis Romayne, and is also noted for a recognised anti-Catholic bias. In this amazing novel of relationships, psychological convolutions, and fraud, a priest comes between an responsive man and the young woman he loves. A high ranking Catholic priest plans to recover land knowing Church property. It analyses very patiently a intense friendship between two men, Lewis Romayne and Arthur Penrose, which in some ways transforms in its power the principal heterosexual relationship depicted in the work. The Black Robe is full of Victorian England's religious views and influences Collins' general commentary about domestic issues and the condition of women. Through the description of the Church's spiritual elite, its priests, and characters' comments, England's anti-Catholicism views are apparent. This book is a kind of enigma, though nobody is murdered. It is a combination of realist late-Victorian fiction with an advice of Gothic.

Wilkie Collins

(Author)

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(London 1824-1889) Playwright, novelist, and prolific short story writer. At 17, he started working at a tea trading company while writing Ioláni, or Tahiti as it was (Gothic no. 32), a work that was not published until over a century after his death. He studied Law and, although he never practiced, he did use his legal knowledge in many of his works, and critics consider him one of the fathers of the detective genre. In 1851, he met Charles Dickens, with whom he formed a deep friendship and published his main works in his weekly All the Year Around. After Dickens' death in 1870, his popularity waned. He suffered from rheumatic gout which eventually led to an opium addiction. His tombstone epitaph highlights him as the author of the novel The Woman in White.

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