Wilkie William Collins (1824–89) was an English novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. He is celebrated as a pioneer of the detective story, especially with The Woman in White and The Moonstone, his popular “novels of sensation.”
Born in London, Collins was the son of the landscape painter William Collins. Wilkie was educated partly at Highbury, and partly in Italy and France. After his return, he spent four years working at a tea import establishment, and then was called to the bar. However, he progressively devoted himself to literature, beginning with a biography of his father, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins (1848.)
Collins’s first work of fiction was the novel Antonina, or the Fall of Rome (1850,) modeled on the historical fiction of the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. With Basil (1852,) he turned his attention to mystery, suspense, and crime, writing the first full-length detective stories in English.
Collins is celebrated for his intricately plotted novels of dramatic intrigue. Set in realistic contemporary middle-class backdrops, his stories pioneered the technique of slowly but surely unfolding a mystery introduced at the beginning of the story. His best works are The Woman in White (1860,) No Name (1862,) Armadale (1866,) and The Moonstone (1868.)
Collins became addicted to opium after taking laudanum for rheumatic gout. His later novels are more uneven in quality, and were motivated by pressing social issues—he attacked marriage laws in Man and Wife (1870) and vivisection in Heart and Science (1883.)
Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens; they collaborated on various literary endeavors. Most of Collins’s early stories and novels appeared in Dickens’s magazines Household Words and All the Year Round. Collins also inspired the skillful and suspenseful plot structures of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860–61.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Wilkie Collins
Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if you only pull it the right way.
—Wilkie Collins
Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death.
—Wilkie Collins
Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.
—Wilkie Collins
The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason
—Wilkie Collins
We had our breakfasts—whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn’t matter, you must have your breakfast.
—Wilkie Collins
Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.
—Wilkie Collins
Topics: Peace
Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.
—Wilkie Collins
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
—Wilkie Collins
Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.
—Wilkie Collins
Topics: Marriage
The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.
—Wilkie Collins
Your tears come easy , when you’re young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you’re old, and leaving it.
—Wilkie Collins
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Charles Reade British Author
Charles Dickens English Novelist
Laurence Housman English Novelist, Dramatist
Edward Lear English Humorist, Illustrator
Thomas Hardy English Novelist, Poet
Hanif Kureishi British Novelist, Screenwriter
Patrick White Australian Novelist
Thomas Hood British Poet, Humorist
Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) English Romantic Poet
Ian McEwan (b.1948) British Novelist, Short-story Writer