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 Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
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	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	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...
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...
Literary responses	Charlotte Yonge	During her lifetime CY was ranked as a serious novelist with Austen , Trollope , Balzac , and Zola . Contemporaries like Louisa Alcott , Margaret Oliphant , Ellen Wood , and Rhoda Broughton made...
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	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...
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...
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...

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