The Diary of Anne Rodway (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

When a poor young seamstress refuses to accept that her dearest friend's death was mere misadventure, she turns amateur investigator in one of the earliest and most affecting detective tales in English.

Told entirely through Anne's own journal, The Diary of Anne Rodway first appeared in Charles Dickens's Household Words in 1856. Its heroine, a working-class needlewoman, pieces together the events behind Mary Mallinson's death from a single fragment of torn cloth, pursuing justice where the authorities see none. Wilkie Collins, later hailed as the father of the English sensation novel and a pioneer of detective fiction, here gave readers a female investigator of rare tenderness and resolve, decades before the genre took shape.