When ‘letter’ becomes ‘litter’ : the (de)construction of the message from Ann Radcliffe to Wilkie Collins

Anglophonia ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-162
Author(s):  
Kirstin Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Ann Radcliffe

The Female Gothic Body

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Mulvey-Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Reproductive Capacity ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Feminist Fiction ◽  
Female Gothic ◽  
The Feminine

This chapter begins by demonstrating that the property and inheritance rights of the early ‘transgressive’ Gothic heroine could be seized by controlling her body through marriage, domestic violence or imprisonment. The Bluebeard legend was then rewritten by women writers, including Ann Radcliffe and Elizabeth Gaskell, so as to embrace female empowerment, while Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Braddon appear to have been influenced by the wrongful confinement within an asylum of Rosina Bulwer Lytton by her husband, Gothic novelist Edward. Throughout history women’s bodies have frequently been regarded as sites of monstrosity and the chapter argues that this cultural abjection is represented within the Gothic in various ways, from the gorgon to the vampire. Fear of the feminine continues to be articulated through the female body and its constituent parts. While the threat of miscegenation through the female body’s reproductive capacity is fragmented in Frankenstein, adaptations of Shelley’s novel by feminist writers, including Shelley Jackson and Elizabeth Hand, celebrate the autonomous patchwork self and scarred female body as representations of a painfully achieved female subjectivity. Other misogynist myths, such as the vagina dentata and the Medusa’s castrating gaze, are similarly deconstructed in other feminist fiction.

Wilkie Collins Reconsidered

1950 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 265-273
Author(s):  
Robert P. Ashley, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins

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.

Aurora Floyd

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
First Marriage ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

abstract ‘With Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling triumvirate of ‘sensation novelists’. Aurora Floyd (1862–3), following hot on its heels, achieved almost equal popularity and notoriety. Like Lady Audley, Aurora is a beautiful young woman bigamously married and threatened with exposure by a blackmailer. But in Aurora Floyd, and in many of the novels written in imitation of it, bigamy is little more than a euphemism, a device to enable the heroine, and vicariously the reader, to enjoy the forbidden sweets of adultery without adulterous intentions. Passionate, sometimes violent, Aurora does succeed in enjoying them, her desires scarcely chastened by her disastrous first marriage. She represents a challenge to the mid-Victorian sexual code, and particularly to the feminine ideal of simpering, angelic young ladyhood. P. D. Edward’s introduction evaluates the novel’s leading place among ‘bigamy-novels’ and Braddon’s treatment of the power struggle between the sexes, as well as considering the similarities between the author and her heroine.

Ancestral Piles

2018 ◽  
pp. 519-541
Author(s):  
Sean Moreland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Architectural Model ◽  
Walter Scott

This essay examines Poe’s conception and use of the Gothic via his engagements with the work of earlier writers from Horace Walpole through Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe’s uses of the Gothic, and his relationship with the work of these writers, was informed by his philosophical materialism and framed by his dialogue with the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Tracing these associations reveals Poe’s transformation of the idea of “Gothic structure” from an architectural model, the ancestral pile of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to one of energetic transformation, the electric pile featured in many of Poe’s tales.

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.

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