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.

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, 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

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.

Multiple Narratives & Relative Truths: a Study ofThe Ring and the Book, The Woman in White, andThe Moonstone

1982 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 143-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Lonoff
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Other ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone

Across the span of a single decade, Robert Browning and Wilkie Collins published, respectively, a poem and two novels with similarly innovative structures. All three works are multiple narratives; that is, they are narrated by several of their characters who function both as actors and witnesses. All three were immediately popular, and all three continue to be regarded as major achievements of their audiors.The Woman in White, serialized inAll the Year Roundfrom 1859 to 1860, quickly became the talk of London and remained so preeminent among Collins's novels that in his will he requested as his epitaph, “author ofThe Woman in Whiteand other works of fiction.”The Ring and the Book, begun in 1864 and inspired by a source that Browning found in 1860, was issued in four volumes, two in 1868 and two in 1869. LikeThe Woman in White, it was widely discussed and admired, exalting Browning's reputation even among readers who had earlier been critical.The Moonstone, begun in 1867 and published serially inAll the Year Roundduring 1868, was not initially as popular as the other two, although its publisher reported that “crowds of anxious readers” waited for the latest serial installments; but today it is Collins's most celebrated novel, often (though inaccurately) cited as the first detective novel in English.

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