Wilkie Collins
1824–1889
Biography
William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright, the son of the London painter William Collins. The family moved to Italy when he was twelve, and he spent two years there and in France, learning Italian and French. He first worked as a tea merchant, and his first novel, Antonina, was published in 1850. That same year he met Charles Dickens, who became his friend and mentor.
Collins published stories in Dickens's journals Household Words and All the Year Round, and the two men also worked together on plays and fiction. By the 1860s his books had brought him financial security and a following abroad. He is best known for The Woman in White (1860), a novel of mystery and false identity that became an early example of the sensation novel, and for The Moonstone (1868), often credited with setting out many conventions that later detective fiction would follow. In his last decades, the opium he took for gout damaged his health, and his reputation as a writer suffered with it.
Both novels are on the site. The Woman in White first ran as a serial in All the Year Round from late 1859 into 1860, and its story is pieced together from several witnesses' accounts. A drawing master named Walter Hartright meets a mysterious woman dressed in white on a road near London at night, and the rest of the book turns on how little the law protected a married woman. The Moonstone, set in Yorkshire and London in the late 1840s, follows the theft of a cursed Indian diamond from a country house and the investigation that follows.
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Books
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone: A Romance by Wilkie Collins is an 1868 British epistolary novel. It is an early example of the modern detective novel, and established many of the ground rules of the modern genre. Its publication was started on 4 January 1868 and was completed on 8 August 1868.…
Summary from Wikipedia: The Moonstone (CC BY-SA 4.0)The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White is Wilkie Collins's fifth published novel, written in 1860 and set from 1849 to 1850. It started its publication on 26 November 1859 and its publication was completed on 25 August 1860. It is a mystery novel and falls under the genre of "sensation novels".…
Summary from Wikipedia: The Woman in White (novel) (CC BY-SA 4.0)