Wilkie Collins Summary

Wilkie Collins - (1824 - 1889) (Full name William Wilkie Collins) English novelist, short story writer, travel writer, and playwright. Considered a skillful manipulator of intricate plots, Collins is ... Read more

Biography EssayAlthough best known to modern readers as the author of The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868)—which T. S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers have called the best English dete... Read more

"Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait." This adage of Wilkie Collins epitomizes his success as the leading sensation novelist of Victorian England. Combining expert plotting with carefully desc... Read more

Victorian fiction writer, essayist, and social commentator Wilkie Collins continues to perplex critics and entertain readers. Critics, pointing to his stereotyped characters, melodramatic plots, somet... Read more

In the following essay, Morris discusses women criminals in the novels of Wilkie Collins, and asserts that Collins portrays criminal behavior among women as a revolt against domestic violence, and by ... Read more

In the following essay, Frick discusses Collins's ambivalent treatment of fallen women in his novels. Introduction In her recent study of the Victorian heroine, Woman and the Demon, Nina Aue... Read more

In the following essay, Perkins and Donaghy examine the subtle critique of Victorian gender conventions in The Woman in White. The unsuspecting reader of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White1 ... Read more

In the following essay, Balée sees The Woman in White as a “subversion of Victorian sexual stereotypes.” Can you look at Miss Halcombe and not see that she has the foresight an... Read more

In the following excerpt, Thoms studies the thematic “quest for independence and identity” in Basil, viewing this early novel's foreshadowing of the principal issues in Collins&#x... Read more

In the following essay, Allen offers an assessment of Collins's works as modern and enduring, rather than merely melodramatic and sensationalistic. Wilkie Collins, the author of Victorian ma... Read more

In the following essay, Duncan explores Collins's representation of romantic imperialist discourse in The Moonstone. Novel and Empire Wilkie Collins's Moonstone (1868) is the sole mid... Read more