The Dead Secret

The Dead Secret is a novel by the English writer Wilkie Collins, published as a serial in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words in 1857 and as a book the same year.

The novel turns on the parentage of Rosamond Treverton, who has been raised as the daughter of Mrs Treverton of Porthgenna Tower but is in fact the illegitimate child of her mother's servant, Sarah Leeson. Mrs Treverton arranged the deception to give her husband the child she could not bear herself, and on her deathbed she dictated the whole story to Sarah, who wrote it down and hid the paper in a disused room of the house. Sarah has carried the weight of that document and of her own promise about it ever since, and the novel follows what happens when Rosamond, now married and living in the house, comes close to learning what is written there.

Collins wrote the book before The Woman in White, and it belongs with the sensation novels of its decade: stories built on illegitimacy, blackmail and a secret that one person has sworn to keep.