Overview
The Moonstone: A Romance is one of the earliest modern detective novels and strikes a little close to home. The namesake jewel in the novel is associated explicitly with Chandra, the god representing the Moon in Hinduism, which is also what my name translates to. It also helped popularize the trope of jewels being taken from a colonized and oppressed peoples before being taken again through an elaborate conspiracy.
While writing the book, Wilkie Collins was struggling with both gout and the recent death of his mother. He found relief in laudanum, a drink that mixed alcohol and opium. After the publication of the novel, he claimed to have taken so much laudanum at some point that he didn’t recall writing many passages, though characters in the novel suffer from memory distortion as a result of their own drug usage.
Notable Quotes
- “The progress of the disease has gradually forced me from the use of opium to the abuse of it.”