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 1991, JP
said of Mistress of Mellyn: This was the sort of book that I loved to write, because I had read so much of the BrontësCharlotte BrontëAnne Brontë
, over and over again, and...
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...
Publishing
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
It ran as a serial in Temple Bar competing with the Cornhill Magazine's Armadale by Wilkie Collins
, whose power MEB
felt she had to fight with his own weapons, mystery, crime, etc.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
167
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
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...
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
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
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...
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...
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
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...
