The Diary of Anne Rodway

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.