Wilkie Collins

08 January 1824 - 23 September 1889

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.

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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...
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
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, pp. 329-79. 370
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. “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...
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...
Publishing	Mary Elizabeth Braddon	Several collections of MEB 's short fiction appeared in the early twenty-first century: The Cold Embrace and Other Ghost Stories (2000) from Ash-Tree Press , At Chrighton Abbey and Other Horror Stories (2002) from Wildside Press
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...
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...
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...
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, pp. 415-27. 422 She indeed opens with a Dickensian flourish, conjuring...
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. 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...

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