Wilkie Collins

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
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...
Friends, Associates Frances Power Cobbe
FPC 's wide London circle included Walter Bagehot , Frances Sarah Colenso and her husband Bishop Colenso (while they were home from Africa), Henry Fawcett , Charles Kingsley , W. E. H. Lecky , Sir Charles Lyell
Textual Production Frances Power Cobbe
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
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...
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 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
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 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...
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...
Textual Features Mary Elizabeth Braddon
In a letter to Bulwer-Lytton from this period, Braddon admits studying the inventive plotting of Frédéric Soulié and borrowing from it.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
128
This plot-driven sensation novel features a former valet, Joseph Wilmot, who, having taken...
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
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Charlotte's Inheritance treats the Stock Exchange and a poisoner based on art critic and murderer Thomas Griffiths Wainewright . Both these books, according to Wolff, reveal the influence of Collins and Balzac , about whose...
Textual Features Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Robert Lee Wolff argues that this is one of MEB 's very best Wilkie Collins -style investigations.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
243
As in much of MEB 's other fiction in this style, the reader can easily and...

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