Résumé
Résumé de Cœur et Science
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who love Victorian fiction with a moral edge, family intrigue and suspense, and stories that set love and kindness against medical ambition.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
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. Here he turns from mystery to argument. The book sets a warm-hearted young woman and her lover against people who put the pursuit of knowledge above kindness. It is also a protest. Collins wrote it in part against experiments on living animals, which were a heated public question in Britain at the time.
You get a love story, a family drama and a portrait of the Victorian medical world. At the centre stands Carmina, a young woman of half Italian blood who comes to live in London. Around her move a young doctor named Ovid Vere, a lady who loves science lectures more than her own child, and a cold, brilliant physiologist named Benjulia. Each person tests the same question. What is a gifted mind worth if it has no heart? Let us begin with Carmina and the house she enters.
Dans ce résumé
- 1Carmina arrives in a cold London houseFree
- 2Mrs. Gallilee loves lectures more than her child
- 3Ovid Vere stands between love and duty
- 4Doctor Benjulia keeps a laboratory and a secret
- 5The book asks what knowledge owes to kindness
- 6Collins tells it as a plotted, persuasive drama
Point clé 1 sur 6
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.
The house Carmina enters belongs to Mrs. Gallilee, a woman of position and energy. Everything in it seems arranged around Mrs. Gallilee's own interests, not around the people who live there. Carmina feels this at once, and she begins to see where affection is given and where it is held back.
From the first chapters Collins makes plain what kind of book this will be. Money, family duty and private feeling are bound together, and a young woman with no great protector must find her way among them. The reader is asked to care for Carmina early, so that the dangers around her feel real.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Cœur et Science
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.
Who is Doctor Benjulia in Heart and Science?
Benjulia is a gifted and cold physiologist who keeps a private laboratory. He stands for knowledge pursued without feeling, and he is the book's chief example of the cost of that attitude.
Is Heart and Science worth reading after The Woman in White?
It is a different book. It has the plotting and suspense Collins is known for, but it is more openly a novel of argument. Readers who like his moral concerns will find it rewarding.