The Yellow Mask, the Black Robe, and the Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, Anti-Catholic Discourse, and the Sensation Novel

Narrative ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M. Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Woman In White

“THESE VERBAL PUZZLES”: WILKIE COLLINS, NEWSPAPER ENIGMAS, AND THE VICTORIAN READER AS SOLVER

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-314
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Variety ◽  
The Third ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Moonstone

In 1861, in a reviewof Wilkie Collins'sThe Woman in White, a critic for theSpectatorcomplained that, “We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel … the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” (“The Enigma Novel” 20). He was hardly the only reviewer to use a vocabulary of “puzzlement” or “enigma” when discussing Collins's work. Whether we look to an earlier review ofThe Woman in Whiteto find Collins faulted as “not a great novelist … the fascination which he exercises … [is] that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume” (Rev. ofThe Woman in White249) – or whether we turn to a critic ofThe Moonstone, who found Collins and his latest production “[un]worthy”: “We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which he has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzles on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity” (Page, ed. 171–72) – we come up against the fact that Collins's novels, and especially his sensation novels, were sometimes known as “enigma novels” in the Victorian period. We can see too that this was not necessarily intended as a complimentary label. Indeed, though our own contemporary tendency has been to employ this particular moniker in a more neutral, descriptive register – to denote simply some fictions' reliance on mystery – we quickly find that Victorian reviewers were not so dispassionate in their usage. Instead, tracking names like “conundrum novel” or “enigma novel,” and terms like “puzzle,” “enigma,” and even “anagram,” shows that Collins's critics often used such phrases to index some of the same kinds of problems or concerns they more familiarly described with a rhetoric of “sensation.” A short survey suggests that their language of “puzzles” and “enigmas,” like their language of shocks and nerves, expressed disappointment at Collins's tendency to create anticlimaxes (the novel fizzles when the “puzzle” is solved); his emphasis on plot – or “carefully prepared enigma[s]” – over character; and his potential to render readers amoral and passive – patient attendants of solutions (“the key to which is not handed to us”) – rather than creatively engaged thinkers or moral questers. A simple nickname would seem to be a damning label indeed, on fuller survey.

Man and Wife

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Country House ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Status Of Women

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

Wilkie Collins and the Woman in White

PMLA ◽  
1939 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clyde K. Hyder
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Woman In White

Inscribed on a tombstone in Kensal Green Cemetery are the following words: “In memory of Wilkie Collins, author of ‘The Woman in White’ and other works of fiction.” This inscription, written (as his will shows) by Collins himself, pays tribute to the book which probably stands highest among his works in the esteem of his readers.

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

2021 ◽  
pp. 316-319
Author(s):  
Joanne Shattock ◽  
Joanne Wilkes ◽  
Katherine Newey ◽  
Valerie Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Woman In White

ON THE TRACK OF THINGS: SENSATION AND MODERNITY IN MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON'S LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Badowska
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Moment

Nineteenth-century reviewers, though they disagreed about nearly all aspects of the sensation phenomenon, were united in diagnosing the sensation novel as a symptom of modernity. In a review of novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, Henry James noted that their books were typically set in “Modern England – the England of to-day's newspaper” and featured protagonists who were “English [gentlewomen] of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph” (593). Like Bram Stoker's Dracula some four decades later, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) represented “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (Stoker 67; ch. 3). But Braddon's novel was also “a sign of the times” because it betokened the rising awareness of modernity's tendency toward rapid obsoleteness (“Our Female Sensation Novelists” 485). The critical hostility directed against it at the moment of its greatest success in the 1860s also had the effect of exposing the seeds of transience that constitute the paradoxical essence of novelty.

London cabs, Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Middlebrook
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Transport ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
City Space ◽  
Woman In White

For all its industrial and technological heat, Victorian Britain remained a largely horse-drawn society. Focusing on the use of horse-drawn vehicles in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel The Woman in White, this essay explores representations of city space, intra-urban mobility, connectivity and public transport in popular nineteenth-century fiction. Cabs, I argue, represent intriguing and paradoxical spaces, poised between public and private, continually on the move in the static city. I ask how literary figurations of horse cabs focus and negotiate anxieties associated with travel within Victorian cities. I also suggest that cabs – vehicles for the fast and disreputable – articulate new ways of occupying space.

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