The Dead Secret

A dying woman dictates a confession, and her maid hides it in an unused room of a Cornish house rather than deliver it — where it waits fifteen years for the daughter it concerns. Collins wrote "The Dead Secret" in 1857, three years before "The Woman in White", and it is his first full use of the buried document. The blind husband's scenes are the best thing in it. Fifty-three plates, from Bonington's beach scenes to Hammershøi's quiet interiors, trace the coastal light and shuttered rooms that haunt this Cornish story of a hidden letter.