SOURCE: "Writing After Dark: Collins and Victorian Literary Culture," in Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 82-185.
In the following essay, Heller examines the nineteenth-century division of sensation novels into "serious" or "popular" and "male" or "female." Heller focuses on Wilkie Collins's collection of short stories published in 1856, After Dark, to explore the way in which the presence of these divisions affected Collins's work.
