Background
Wilkie Collins was born in London on Jan. 8, 1824, the son of a successful painter.
(William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 23 September 188...)
William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His best-known works are The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868). The last is considered the first modern English detective novel. Born into the family of painter William Collins in London, he lived with his family in Italy and France as a child and learned French and Italian. He worked as a clerk for a tea merchant. After his first novel, Antonina, was published in 1850, he met Charles Dickens, who became a close friend, mentor and collaborator. Some of Collins's works were first published in Dickens' journals All the Year Round and Household Words and the two collaborated on drama and fiction.
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(The Woman in White is Wilkie Collins' fifth published nov...)
The Woman in White is Wilkie Collins' fifth published novel, written in 1859. It is considered to be among the first mystery novels and is widely regarded as one of the first (and finest) in the genre of "sensation novels". The story is sometimes considered an early example of detective fiction with protagonist Walter Hartright employing many of the sleuthing techniques of later private detectives. The use of multiple narrators (including nearly all the principal characters) draws on Collins's legal training, and as he points out in his Preamble: "the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness". In 2003, Robert McCrum writing for The Observer listed The Woman in White number 23 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", and the novel was listed at number 77 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.
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novelist playwright short story writer
Wilkie Collins was born in London on Jan. 8, 1824, the son of a successful painter.
He was educated at a private school in Highbury, and when only a small boy of twelve was taken by his parents to Italy, where the family lived for three years.
Leaving school in his sixteenth year, he was apprenticed to a tea importer but had little enthusiasm for business.
He published a number of articles and stories, exhibited a picture at the Royal Academy, and was an early supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
As a young man, he both wrote and painted.
His first published novel, Antonina, or the Fall of Rome (1850), was modeled on the historical fiction of the popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Collins met Charles Dickens in 1851 and became one of his closest friends.
In it a scheme to rob a woman of her fortune turns on the existence of a mysterious double who dies and is substituted for the victim.
Although Armadale (1866) contained no mystery, its plot was even more complex and its atmosphere even richer.
He died on Sept. 23, 1889, after prolonged illness.
(William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 23 September 188...)
(The Woman in White is Wilkie Collins' fifth published nov...)
(A collectiblethird edition, HRN 70 of a 1946 Classic Illu...)
Collins never married but maintained a rather enigmatic relationship with two women, one of whom lived with him for almost 30 years.