Wilkie Collins

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Standard Name: Collins, Wilkie
Used Form: William Wilkie Collins
Used Form: W. Wilkie Collins
Best remembered for his sensational fiction of the 1860s, WC was, in the course of his forty-year writing career, the author of many ingeniously-plotted novels, as well as a writer of plays (some in collaboration with Charles Dickens ), short stories, a biography of his father, and a travel book. Innovative narrative technique is a feature of his work, along with legal and social critique. His writings are also notable, in a literary culture that viewed physical difference as a marker of moral failure, for their sympathetic representation of disability.
Caricature of Wilkie Collins, with oversized head and hat and skinny legs. He is putting up a poster for The Woman in White and his jacket pocket is stuffed with posters.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Cholmondeley
In its parody of the mystery genre, this often melodramatic novel features an unreliable narrator, stock characters (e.g. rich maiden aunt, prodigal son, American stranger, poor cousin), and is said to bear a resemblance to...
Intertextuality and Influence John Strange Winter
At the height of her career JSW gave an account of her early development to the memoirist George Bainton . She said she hardly knew how or why she came to be able to write...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB was encouraged to write from an early age, particularly by her mother. She would later recall how when she was eight and had just learned to write, her godfather bought her a beautiful brand...
Intertextuality and Influence Harriet Martineau
According to HM 's Autobiography, she drew inspiration for the setting and heroine of a later story (The Hamlets, part of Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated) from seeing William Collins 's...
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Admirers of Lady Audley included Thackeray , according to his daughter Anne .
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
9
Arnold Bennett gave it very high praise. Of the passage in which Lucy Audley decides to try to murder Robert, he...
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Henry James 's review in 1865 considered Braddon's success alongside that of Collins , pronouncing her the founder of the sensation novel (defined as devising domestic mysteries adapted to the wants of a sternly prosaic...
Literary responses Emily Spender
The Athenæum reviewer, Almaric Rumsey , guessed the novelist's gender from the use of the bigamy motif, which he felt to be obviously derivative from more talented novelists (Wilkie Collins 's recently published The...
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
During her lifetime CY was ranked as a serious novelist with Austen , Trollope , Balzac , and Zola . Contemporaries like Louisa Alcott , Margaret Oliphant , Ellen Wood , and Rhoda Broughton made...
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Margaret Oliphant 's critique of the sensation novel in 1867 relied heavily on attacking MEB 's reputation. The best she would say was that some of Braddon's works deserved some of their success. Braddon's sole...
Literary responses Ellen Wood
The Saturday Review praised her craft in Dene Hollow, stating that even Mr. Wilkie Collins himself, to whom ingenuity is the Alpha and Omega of his craft, is not greater than she in the...
Literary responses Ellen Wood
Within a few years EW 's popularity had decidedly waned. Margaret Oliphant in The Victorian Age of English Literature found nothing to say about Wood beyond that fact that her works sold by the fifty...
Literary responses Marjorie Bowen
Critically, the book was very well received. Edward Wagenknecht in the New York Times Book Review enthused over MB 's settings, calling her a genius in the creation of atmosphere,
qtd. in
Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 153. Gale Research, 1995.
153: 45
and stated that...
Literary responses Mary Cholmondeley
George Bentley referred to The Danvers Jewels as bright and humorous.
qtd. in
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
197
In 1900, the Edinburgh Review judged that it had no great merit since the devices used had been worn rather threadbare in the...
Literary responses Marie Belloc Lowndes
It was reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement by Walter de la Mare , who wrote appreciatively of the faint arresting strangeness, the sense of sinister events impending, which is present from the opening sentence...
Material Conditions of Writing Mary Angela Dickens
The journal All the Year Round, founded by MAD 's grandfather and then edited by her father, was one of the first and most significant platforms for her short stories and serialized novels. Other...

Timeline

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Texts

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