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Famous Like Me > Writer > C > Wilkie Collins

Profile of Wilkie Collins on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Wilkie Collins  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 8th January 1824
   
Place of Birth: London, England, UK
   
Profession: Writer
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and writer of short stories. He was hugely popular in his time, and wrote 27 novels, more than 50 short stories, at least 15 plays, and over 100 pieces of non-fiction work.

Life

Collins was born in London, the son of a well-known landscape painter, William Collins. At 17 he left school and was apprenticed to a firm of tea merchants, but after five unhappy years, during which he wrote his first (unpublished) novel Iolani, he entered Lincoln's Inn to study law. After his father's death in 1847, Collins produced his first published book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848), and also considered a career in painting, exhibiting a picture at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1849, but it was with the publication of his first novel Antonina in 1850 that his career as a writer began in earnest.

An instrumental event in Collins' career occurred in 1851 when he was introduced to Charles Dickens by a mutual friend, Augustus Egg. They became lifelong friends and collaborators; several of Collins' novels were serialised in Dickens' weekly publication All the Year Round, and Dickens later edited and published them himself.

Collins suffered from a form of arthritis known as 'rheumatic gout', and became severely addicted to the opium that he took (in the form of laudanum) to relieve the pain. As a result he experienced paranoid delusions, the most notable being his conviction that he was constantly accompanied by a doppelganger he dubbed 'Ghost Wilkie'. His novel The Moonstone prominently features the effects of opium, and opium addiction. While he was writing it, Collins' consumption of Laudanum was such that he later claimed to have no memory of writing large parts of the novel.

Collins was never married, but lived, on and off from 1858, with a widow, Mrs Caroline Graves and her daughter. He also fathered three children by another woman, Martha Rudd, whom he had met after Mrs Graves left him in 1868. Mrs Graves returned to Collins after two years and he continued both relationships until his death in 1889.

He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, West London.

Works

His works were classified at the time as 'sensation novels', a genre seen nowadays as the precursor to detective fiction and suspense fiction. He also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women and on the social and domestic issues of his time. Like many writers of his time, he published most of his novels as serials in magazines such as Dickens's All the Year Round, and was known as a master of the form, creating just the right degree of suspense to keep his audience reading from week to week.

His early novel The Woman in White (1860) deals effectively with issues relating the women's roles and class issues in Victorian society, as well as establishing a fine set of villains and innocent, female victims. It shares with The Moonstone (1868) an unusual narrative structure, somewhat resembling an epistolary novel, in which different portions of the book have different narrators, each with a very distinct narrative voice.

Bibliography

  • Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848)
  • Antonina (1850)
  • Basil (1852)
  • Mr Wray's Cash Box (1852)
  • Hide and Seek (1854)
  • The Dead Secret (1856)
  • The Woman in White (1860)
  • No Name (1862)
  • Armadale (1866)
  • The Moonstone (1868)
  • Man and Wife (1870)
  • Poor Miss Finch (1872)
  • Miss or Mrs? (1873)
  • The New Magdalen (1873)
  • The Law and The Lady (1875)
  • The Two Destinies (1876)
  • The Haunted Hotel (1878)
  • The Fallen Leaves (1879)
  • A Rogue's Life (1879)
  • My Lady's Money (1879)
  • Jezebel's Daughter (1880)
  • The Black Robe (1881)
  • Heart and Science (1883)
  • I Say No (1884)
  • The Evil Genius (1886)
  • The Guilty River (1886)
  • The Legacy of Cain (1889)
  • Blind Love (1889)

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Wilkie Collins