These are works of nature that wind us through the year on a river of changing seasons, and around every turn, the reader sees the art of the beaver, hears the descending song of the canyon wren, and is surprised by personal dragons. Here is poetry that embraces drunken Frenchmen and childhood longings; some remain in the ether, some are realized. From death, basketball, and the long arm of fantasy from someone who has forgotten his meds, straightforward descriptions of zoological specimens morph into something fresh. These poems are the adventures of a varied life where the therapist is a guitar, mountain lions and street folk respected comrades, and a canoe the better office.

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins’. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Collins includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily. eBook features: * The complete unabridged text of ‘Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ * Beautifully illustrated with images related to Collins’s works * Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook * Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles

First published in 1932, in Finch’s Fortune, Finch Whiteoak celebrates his twenty-first birthday and comes into his inheritance from Grandmother Adeline. He generously takes his elderly uncles to England and lives for a time with his Aunt Augusta. While in England, Finch falls in and out of love with his cousin Sarah Court. He returns to Jalna, where the fortune left to him remains a bone of contention amongst other members of the Whiteoak family. This is book 9 of 16 in The Whiteoak Chronicles. It is followed by The Master of Jalna.

Mr. Wilkie Collins brings to his work, along with other and valuable qualities, the special talent of the private detective and the criminal lawyer. Almost no modern novelist stands in any comparison with him for skill in constructing the engrenage, as a Frenchman would call it, of personal complication, for subtle delicacy in fitting together wheel and spring, pivot and pinion of his dramatic clockwork, in such fascinating interplay as shall lead the attention of the breathless spectator smoothly, imperceptibly, but inevitably to the final wind-up of the catastrophe. This skill in combining events is supplemented by, or rather cognate with, his shrewd analysis of character and motive. It is his favorite plan to suppose a case of private relation where virtuous personages or important interests are threatened by the schemes of some clever villain. Against him Mr. Collins, in the person of his beneficent and equally clever hero or heroine, straight sets his wits to defend the interests or persons attacked. The resulting struggle is carried on with the most exquisite skill of fence, involving both practical device and metaphysical penetration and shrewdness, till the final triumph of the right and confusion of the wrong-doers. In this book the metaphysical element assumes unusual importance. The book is in so far an exception to the usual run of Mr. Collins's works, that it is less a leaf from the records of Scotland Yard than an extract from the diary of a psychologist. There is a villain and a protecting genius, as usual ; but the villain is only a half one after all, and we are less interested in the actual facts of his rascality than in the causes which lead him to it, and the temperament which renders it possible. In the leading character, poor Miss Finch herself, the author develops an interesting question of medical psychology. A young girl, blind almost from her birth, loves one of two twin brothers, who has, in the process of medical treatment for epilepsy, been terribly disfigured in complexion by the use of nitrate of silver. From Lucilla's instinctive horror of dark objects, the injudicious and timid concealment by the lover of his dusky hue, and the treacherous advantage taken of these things by the other twin, Nugent, to supplant his brother — the whole complicated by Lucilla's temporary restoration to sight and subsequent relapse — arises the whole intrigue of the story …

This short play highlights one night in the life of the dysfunctional Finch family, made up of Frank--the bullying father, Darlene-- the loving but crazy mother, and Merlin--their nerdy bassoon-playing son.

What if you had been deprived of sight for your entire life -- only to have your vision restored just as you found yourself falling in love for the first time? That's the seemingly miraculous fate that befalls the Miss Finch of the title in this classic novel from abidingly popular nineteenth-century author Wilkie Collins.

At the same time her stance as a feminist led her not only to articulate issues in terms of gender but also to define her poetry in opposition to the dominant literary form of the age, satire."--BOOK JACKET.