The Legacy of Cain

A minister adopts the infant daughter of a woman just hanged for murder, raises her beside his own child, and tells neither girl which is which — while the prison governor who knows the secret watches for the inheritance to show. Collins had written The Moonstone, often called the first English detective novel; this late book of 1888 is his attack on the fashionable science of criminal heredity, and the experiment is conducted on the reader as much as on the girls. Fifty-eight plates, among them Munch and Streeton, turn the novel's question of inherited guilt outward into still lifes, portraits and landscapes that ask what a face or a field can be made to confess.