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.
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
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...
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
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 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...
Publishing
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens's romance about the French Revolution set largely in Paris, appeared in 1859 in several forms:first serially in his new journal All the Year Round, and, overlapping...
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
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...
Friends, Associates
Charles Dickens
As one of the leading literary figures of the period, CD
had an extensive social network. His early acquaintances in publishing included Richard Bentley
, William Harrison Ainsworth
, and John Forster
(who later became...
Illustrated by George du Maurier
, this serial ran alongside fiction by Trollope
and Thackeray
, and shared the lead with Collins
's Armadale. EG
received £2,000 for the serialisation (as compared to Collins's...
Performance of text
Elizabeth Inchbald
It was published at Dublin in 1789, and held the stage well during the early nineteenth century: October-November 1824 saw two rival productions at different theatres. Dickens
directed the production of a much-revised version in...
