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.
Her estate was valued at £36,393, 13s. 3d., a substantial amount for any writer of the period (and considerably more than contemporaries such as Wilkie Collins
and Anthony Trollope
).
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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
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...
Education
John Strange Winter
After this she completed her education at home. Although even in this context she says, I was not well educated, for I never would learn,
Bainton, George, editor. The Art of Authorship. J. Clarke.
24
she also described herself as having always been from...
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...
Reception
Sarah Waters
SW
calls this book on the one hand a homage to the sensation novels of Braddon
and Wilkie Collins
, on the other hand a reflection of 1990s excitement over the concept of queer. Writing...
Textual Production
Michelene Wandor
Novels adapted by MW
are not restricted to those by women. Works by male writers she has revised for broadcasting include Kipps by H. G. Wells
, aired on Radio 4
in 1984 and runner-up...
Friends, Associates
Lucy Walford
LW
had many friends among literary people and those who moved in literary circles. She discussed the books of her childhood with Reginald Palgrave
, who shared many of her early reading experiences, and Wilkie Collins
Reception
Lucy Walford
After the publication of Recollections of a Scottish NovelistLW
decided that there were still stories in her mind that rank among the great days of my life, yet which did not fit in with...
Reception
Queen Victoria
Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands outsold many books that appeared in 1868, including Wilkie Collins
's The Moonstone, Robert Browning
's Ring and the Book, and Louisa May Alcott
Occupation
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Frances Eleanor Ternan (later FET
), her sisters Maria
and Ellen
, and her mother Frances
, performed with Dickens
in Wilkie Collins
's The Frozen Deep, which opened at the New Free Trade Hall in Manchester.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. HarperCollins.
786-8, 790
Occupation
Helen Taylor
F. A. Hayek
speculates that she played a small role in Wilkie Collins
' The Red Vial on its opening night at the Olympic Theatre
in October 1858.
Hayek, Friedrich Augustus von et al. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; Their Correspondence [i.e. Friendship] and Subsequent Marriage. University of Chicago Press.
260-1
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...
Reception
Harriet Smythies
In April 1863 HS
's novel The Daily Governess; or, Self-Dependence (1861) was included as part of Henry Mansel
's attack on sensation novels in the Quarterly Review. Although HS
was not a major...
Timeline
4 May 1799: Forces in Mysore, India, opposing British...
National or international item
4 May 1799
Forces in Mysore, India, opposing British rule were finally defeated at the second capture of Seringapatam.
April 1863: Henry Mansel in the Quarterly Review attacked...
Writing climate item
April 1863
Henry Mansel
in the Quarterly Review attacked sensation novels as preaching to the nerves and as indications of a wide-spread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into...
1876: John Maxwell sold Belgravia to Chatto and...
28 September 1883: A meeting of authors, chaired by Walter Besant,...
Writing climate item
28 September 1883
A meeting of authors, chaired by Walter Besant
, gathered to found the Company of Authors, later the Society of Authors
, to improve the earning prospects of writers and lobby for copyright protection.
Texts
Collins, Wilkie. Antonina. R. Bentley, 1850.
Collins, Wilkie. “Appendices”. Heart and Science, edited by Steve Farmer, Broadview Press, 1996, pp. 329-79.
Collins, Wilkie. Armadale. Smith, Elder, 1866.
Collins, Wilkie. Basil. R. Bentley, 1852.
Collins, Wilkie et al. Blind Love. Chatto and Windus, 1890.
Collins, Wilkie. Heart and Science. Chatto and Windus, 1883.
Sayers, Dorothy L., and Wilkie Collins. “Introduction”. The Moonstone, Dent; Dutton, 1967, p. v - xi.
Collins, Wilkie. No Name. Sampson Low, 1862.
Collins, Wilkie. Poor Miss Finch. Bentley, 1872.
Collins, Wilkie. The Evil Genius. Chatto and Windus, 1886.
Collins, Wilkie. The Law and the Lady. Chatto and Windus, 1875.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Tinsley Brothers, 1868.
Collins, Wilkie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. The Moonstone. Dent; Dutton, 1967.
Collins, Wilkie. The New Magdalen. Bentley, 1873.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Sampson Low, 1860.
