Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins (William Wilkie Collins), 1824-89, English novelist. Although trained as a lawyer, he spent most of his life writing, producing some 30 novels. He is best known for two mystery stories, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), which are considered the first full-length detective novels in English and among the best of their genre; they helped to define the genre of literary melodrama which would peak at the end of the century. Collins's heroines are drawn with considerable clarity and sympathy. He was a friend of Dickens, in whose periodical Household Words many of Collins's novels first appeared.

Bibliography: See W. Baker and W. M. Clarke, ed., The Letters of Wilkie Collins (Vol. I-II;, 2000); biographies by W. M. Clarke (1988) and C. Peters (1993); studies by M. P. Davis (1956), W. H. Marshall (1970), N. Page (1974), and S. Lonoff (1982).

Collins, (William) Wilkie (1824–89) English novelist. He made important contributions to the development of detective fiction, especially in his two enduringly popular novels, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). He collaborated with Charles Dickens in writing plays and stories.

Collins, (William) Wilkie (1824–89). Novelist. Collins, usually regarded as the pioneer of the detective story, was born in London, son of a painter. He began in the law, but took up writing professionally after publishing a biography of his father in 1848, and becoming a close friend of Charles Dickens, to whose magazine Household Words he contributed. His first big success was The Woman in White (1860), and he repeated it with The Moonstone (1868). He has been identified as an exponent of ‘the novel of sensation’, appealing to a less sophisticated readership with lurid plots of dark secrets, dastardly scoundrels, drugs, and insanity. Collins was unmarried but did not want for female comfort. A splendid portrait by his friend Millais (1850) is in the National Portrait Gallery.

J. A. Cannon