14 h 43 minAudiobook7 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What is a brilliant mind worth when it has no room for kindness?
Carmina comes to live with relatives in London after a loss. Warm-hearted and raised partly in Italy, she enters a household where affection competes with ambition. She falls in love with Ovid Vere, a young doctor who wants to care for his patients without losing his sympathy. Their love faces people who value knowledge above kindness.
Mrs. Gallilee fills her days with scientific lectures while neglecting her daughter, Zo. Doctor Benjulia, a gifted physiologist, gives himself to laboratory research with little room for pity. In Heart and Science, Wilkie Collins brings romance and family intrigue into a firm protest against experiments on living animals, asking where medical ambition should stop.
What you’ll discover
- Love with a conscience Follow Carmina and Ovid as their affection meets the demands of duty and medical ambition.
- A household short of warmth Meet Mrs. Gallilee, whose hunger for learned talk leaves her own daughter longing for attention.
- Brilliance without pity Encounter Benjulia, a skilled researcher whose devotion to his laboratory gives the story its darkest note.
- Fierce loyalty and plain speaking Discover Teresa's watchful devotion to Carmina and Zo's lively, outspoken need to be noticed.
- Questions that keep you reading Find chapters that close on questions, drawing family tension into the argument over knowledge and kindness.
Who will love it
For readers who love Victorian fiction with a moral edge, family intrigue and suspense, and stories that set love and kindness against medical ambition.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Carmina arrives in a cold London house
- Mrs. Gallilee loves lectures more than her child
- Ovid Vere stands between love and duty
- Doctor Benjulia keeps a laboratory and a secret
- The book asks what knowledge owes to kindness
- Collins tells it as a plotted, persuasive drama
Who’s who
- CarminaA warm-hearted young woman of part Italian blood who comes to London and wants to be loved and to stay true to those she trusts.
- Ovid VereA young doctor with a conscience, who loves Carmina and wants to practise medicine without losing his sympathy for patients.
- Mrs. GallileeA forceful lady devoted to scientific lectures and her own standing, who neglects her young daughter and tries to rule those around her.
- Doctor BenjuliaA brilliant and cold physiologist who lives for his laboratory research and has little room left for pity.
- ZoMrs. Gallilee's small younger daughter, lively and outspoken, who longs for the attention her mother never gives.
- TeresaCarmina's devoted Italian maid, fierce in loyalty and suspicious of the English, who watches over her young mistress.
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- Paperback
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
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Read and hear Herz und Wissenschaft in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Herz und Wissenschaft
by Wilkie Collins · 1883
Carmina enters a London household where love and kindness face the cold ambitions of science.
Medium level10–20 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Heart and Science is a novel by Wilkie Collins, published in 1883. Collins was by then well known for The Woman in White and The Moonstone, both tales of secrets and mystery.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Carmina arrives in a cold London house
The story begins with Carmina, a young woman raised partly in Italy, whose warmth and openness mark her out from the English world she enters. She comes to live with relatives in London after a loss, and she is not sure how she will be received. Collins gives her a quick feeling heart and a loyal nature, and these two traits drive much of what follows.
She is accompanied by an Italian maid named Teresa, who is fiercely devoted to her and suspicious of the English. Teresa is a comic figure at times, but she is also a guardian. She watches every stranger who comes near her young mistress, and her instincts are often sharper than those of the people around her.
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What is Heart and Science about?
It is a Victorian novel about a young woman named Carmina, her love for the doctor Ovid Vere, and the people who threaten them. It sets feeling against cold ambition, especially in medicine and research.
Is Heart and Science about vivisection?
Yes, in large part. Collins wrote it as a protest against experiments on living animals, and the physiologist Doctor Benjulia embodies the danger he saw in research carried out without pity.
When was Heart and Science written?
Wilkie Collins published it in 1883, late in his career. It is a work of fiction, but it draws on a real public debate in Victorian Britain about animal experiments.
The author
Wilkie Collins
1824–1889 · English mystery novelist
Wilkie Collins was a British novelist and playwright born in London in 1824. He lived mainly in London and died there in 1889. His novels include The Woman in White (1859–1860), The Moonstone (1868), The Law and the Lady (1875), and The Black Robe (1881).
More by Wilkie Collins
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