The Black Robe

The Black Robe is an 1881 epistolary ( series of letters) novel by famous English writer, Wilkie Collins. The book relates the adversities of Lewis Romayne, and is also noted for a recognised anti-Catholic bias. In this amazing novel of relationships, psychological convolutions, and fraud, a priest comes between an responsive man and the young woman he loves. A high ranking Catholic priest plans to recover land knowing Church property. It analyses very patiently a intense friendship between two men, Lewis Romayne and Arthur Penrose, which in some ways transforms in its power the principal heterosexual relationship depicted in the work. The Black Robe is full of Victorian England’s religious views and influences Collins’ general commentary about domestic issues and the condition of women. Through the description of the Church’s spiritual elite, its priests, and characters’ comments, England’s anti-Catholicism views are apparent. This book is a kind of enigma, though nobody is murdered. It is a combination of realist late-Victorian fiction with an advice of Gothic.