Aprolific writer, Wilkie Collins (1824-89) authored some 25 novels, along with numerous articles, short stories, and plays. He was a close friend and collaborator of his elder contemporary, the novelist Charles Dickens (1812-70), who also served as editor of periodicals. Beginning in the 1850s, Dickens serialized Collins’s novels in his periodicals Household Words (1850-59) and its successor All the Year Round (1859-88). The two friends also worked together on a number of short stories for the periodicals, and jointly wrote, produced, and acted in plays for Dickens’s stage company as well. Best known among Collins’s novels are, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868); both were serialized in All the Year Round and later adapted by Collins for production on the stage. Collins’s tales are memorably dramatic, featuring strong villains and victimized heroines. In The Moonstone these plot elements are combined with crime and detection in a way that would distinguish the book, in the eyes of many modern critics, as the first true detective novel in English. Present-day critics have also seen deeper concerns at work in Collins’s novels, which question many of the assumptions on which Victorian society rested.
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