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.
Connections
Connections | Author name Sort ascending | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Textual Features | Ella D'Arcy | Perhaps aimed at a Temple Bar formula, it has thriller-style action and stilted dialogue which suggests a sensation novel by Wilkie Collins
or Mary Elizabeth Braddon
, but which proved not to be D'Arcy territory... |
Textual Features | Dinah Mulock Craik | This original fairy tale features the Prince Dolor, who is crippled as an infant, deprived of his rule by a Prince Regent uncle, and brought up in miserable conditions. A fairy godmother gives him a... |
Textual Production | Frances Power Cobbe | FPC
also supported other writers on the subject, such as Wilkie Collins
, whom she supplied with materials towards his novel Heart and Science, 1883. Collins, Wilkie. “Appendices”. Heart and Science, edited by Steve Farmer, Broadview Press, 1996, pp. 329-79. 370 |
Friends, Associates | Frances Power Cobbe | FPC
's wide London circle included Walter Bagehot
, Frances Sarah Colenso
and her husband Bishop Colenso
(while they were home from Africa), Henry Fawcett
, Charles Kingsley
, W. E. H. Lecky
, Sir Charles Lyell |
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... |
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 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Charlotte Chanter | Critic |
Textual Features | Mary Elizabeth Braddon | MEB
recalled the publisher's desire for a blend of the human interest and genial humour of Dickens
with the plot-weaving of G. W. M. Reynolds
. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth et al. “My First Novel”. The Trail of the Serpent, edited by Chris Willis and Chris Willis, Modern Library, 2003, pp. 415-27. 422 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Mary Elizabeth Braddon | Its criminal heroine or anti-heroine, a blonde and childlike paragon of Victorian femininity, is a villainous counter-type of the passive, fair-haired Laura Fairlie, heroine of Wilkie Collins
's The Woman in White, which MEB |
Literary responses | Mary Elizabeth Braddon | Admirers of Lady Audley included Thackeray
, according to his daughter Anne
. Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979. 9 |
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... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Mary Elizabeth Braddon | |
Textual Features | Mary Elizabeth Braddon | In a letter to Bulwer-Lytton
from this period, Braddon admits studying the inventive plotting of Frédéric Soulié
and borrowing from it. Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979. 128 |
Publishing | Mary Elizabeth Braddon | It ran as a serial in Temple Bar competing with the Cornhill Magazine's Armadale by Wilkie Collins
, whose power MEB
felt she had to fight with his own weapons, mystery, crime, etc. qtd. in Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979. 167 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Mary Elizabeth Braddon | Charlotte's Inheritance treats the Stock Exchange
and a poisoner based on art critic and murderer Thomas Griffiths Wainewright
. Both these books, according to Wolff, reveal the influence of Collins
and Balzac
, about whose... |
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