This book builds on a critical and scholarly revival of interest in Collins. Baker draws upon biographical revelations and the recent publication of Collins's letters to provide a unique insight into both the man and the writer. The volume will appeal to all students of Collins and those with an interest in the life of Nineteenth-century England.

Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular writers of the nineteenth century. He is best known for The Woman in White, which inaugurated the sensation novel in the 1860s, and The Moonstone, one of the first detective novels; but he wrote over 20 novels, plays and short stories during a career that spanned four decades. This Companion offers a fascinating overview of Collins's writing. In a wide range of essays by leading scholars, it traces the development of his career, his position as a writer and his complex relation to contemporary cultural movements and debates. Collins's exploration of the tensions which lay beneath Victorian society is analysed through a variety of critical approaches. A chronology and guide to further reading are provided, making this book an indispensable guide for all those interested in Wilkie Collins and his work.

This book examines how Wilkie Collins’s interest in medical matters developed in his writing through exploration of his revisions of the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel from his first sensation novels to his last novels of the 1880s. Throughout his career, Collins made changes in the prototypical Gothic scenario. The aristocratic villains, victimized maidens and medieval castles of classic Gothic tales were reworked and adapted to thrill his Victorian readership. With the advances of neuroscience and the development of criminology as a significant backdrop to most of his novels, Collins drew upon contemporary anxieties and increasingly used the medical to propel his criminal plots. While the prototypical castles were turned into modern medical institutions, his heroines no longer feared ghosts but the scientist’s knife. This study hence underlines the way in which Collins’s Gothic revisions increasingly tackled medical questions, using the medical terrain to capitalize on the readers’ fears. It also demonstrates how Wilkie Collins’s fiction reworks Gothic themes and presents them through the prism of contemporary scientific, medical and psychological discourses, from debates revolving around mental physiology to those dealing with heredity and transmission. The book’s structure is chronological covering a selection of texts in each chapter, with a balance between discussion of the more canonical of Collins’s texts such as The Woman in White, The Moonstone and Armadale and some of his more neglected writings.

Suspense, humor, and romance abound in this 1868 mystery, in which a gem stolen from a Hindu shrine resurfaces in an English country home — with a trio of watchful Brahmins hot on its trail.

William Wilkie Collins (1824 - 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known works are The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale, and No Name. Collins was born into the family of painter William Collins in London. He received his early education at home from his mother. He then attended an academy and a private boarding school. He also traveled with his family to Italy and France, and learned the French and Italian languages. He served as a clerk in the firm of the tea merchants Antrobus & Co. His first novel Iolani, or Tahiti as It Was; a Romance, was rejected by publishers in 1845. His next novel, Antonina, was published in 1850. In 1851 he met Charles Dickens, and the two became close friends. A number of Collins's works were first published in Dickens's journals In this book: The Moonstone The woman in white After dark

Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life', Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women -- and avidly read by generations of readers. Ackroyd follows his hero, 'the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists', from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. A true Londoner, Collins, like Dickens, was fascinated by the secrets and crimes -- the fraud, blackmail and poisonings -- that lay hidden behind the city's respectable facade. He was a fighter, never afraid to point out injustices and shams , or to tackle the establishment head on. As well as his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone -- often called the first true detective novel -- and the sensational The Woman in White, he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. Collins had his own secrets: he never married, but lived for thirty years with the widowed Caroline Graves, and also had a second liaison, as 'Mr and Mrs Dawson', with a younger mistress, Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Both women remained devoted as illness and opium-taking took their toll: he died in 1889, in the middle of writing his last novel, Blind Love. Told with Peter Ackroyd's inimitable verve this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great story-teller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.

Wilkie Collins is mainly remembered for his best-selling sensation novel The Woman in White and his detective mystery The Moonstone , both published in the 1860s. However, in a literary career spanning nearly forty years he wrote over twenty novels, several plays, and numerous short stories in which his preoccupations with Victorian society are revealed. Irregular liaisons, the chaotic state of the marriage laws, social and psychological identity, and the interconnections between respectable society and the world of crime are recurring themes in Collins's fiction. Lyn Pykett looks at Collins's long and varied career in relation to the changing circumstances of his own life, a changing literary marketplace, and the changing worlds of nineteenth-century Britain, as well as his enduring legacy for modern writers and interpreters. The book includes a chronology of Collins's life and times, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.