Synopsis "Hide and Seek"

Full text.The girl named Mary -- they called her Madonna, and she was deaf and dumb and beautiful as a painting by Raphael -- was a mystery. The Blyths adopted her from a kindly old woman connected to a traveling circus, but everyone knew she wasn't from circus folk. All they DID know about her identity was that she'd lost her hearing in an accident, and the proprietor of the circus had treated her horribly, and, and . . . and in her cache of secret personal private things, she owned one thing as precious to her as life itself: a bracelet made of brown human hair with the initials MG tied into it. The Blyths kept it locked in a bureau for fear that Mary's unknown family might one day claim her. . . .

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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