Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Wilkie Collins
-
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.
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...
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
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...
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
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,
Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 153. Gale Research.
153: 45
and stated that...
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...
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...
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
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
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...
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...
