Employing finely tuned plots, vivid descriptions, multiple narrative styles, and dramatic language, they have received critical praise from such writers as T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, and Julian Symons. Wilkie Collins was a novelist who took as his basic goal "the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story," as he stated in the preface to
The Woman in White. But balancing his commitment to story was his realization that "not one man in ten thousand, living in the midst of reality, has discovered that he is also living in the midst of romance." The ambiguity of a reality which is both factual and mysterious is the foundation of his fictional world where crime lies hidden beneath the surface of the everyday. His world, as Dickens commented, is "wild yet domestic."
The studio life of the nineteenth-century artist provided a stimulating environment for the young William Wilkie Collins, eldest son of the respected and successful landscape painter William Collins, R.A., whose patrons included Sir Robert Peel and Lord Liverpool. Exhibitions, painting trips, celebrity visits, and drawing became common for the soon-to-be successful writer. Named after his godfather, the well-known painter Sir David Wilkie, R.A., Wilkie Collins studied painting for several years.
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