Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
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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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
It opens in medias res aboard a steamer travelling from Cape Town to London, with the chance encounter of childhood friends. These are Arnold Wentworth, alias Alfred Wildover, the prodigal son of a gentleman...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Chanter
Critic John Sutherland discerns the influence of Wilkie Collins
on the novel's plot. Certainly the figure of the mysterious woman in black who aims to avenge herself on her husband's destroyers recalls the description of...
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...
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
Mrs Alexander
Its plot is similar to that of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
, published the year before in All The Year Round, except that the sexes are transposed.
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press.
After the awe-inspiring moment of death...
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
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
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
infused a touch of poetry more literally by frequent allusion to works by Tennyson
, including Mariana, The Deserted House, and The Lotos-Eaters. Her trademark use of other authors' texts as...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
published her fiction in stand-alone volumes as well as journals and magazines throughout her career. Assessing the quality of her work, John Sutherland
claims that her style showed the strong influence of Wilkie Collins
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...
