Wilkie Collins
A Brief Life
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A gripping short biography of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, two early masterpieces of mystery and detection.
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely nearsighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colorful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was nonetheless a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women—and avidly read by generations of readers. Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, "the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists," from Collins' childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame, and his lifelong friendship with that other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. In addition to his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone—often called the first true detective novel—and the sensational The Woman in White, he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. Told with Ackroyd's inimitable verve, this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great storyteller, full of surprises, rich in humor and sympathetic understanding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This compact but detailed biography illuminates the literary career of Wilkie Collins (1824 1889), whose "sensation stories" made him one of the Victorian era's most popular authors. Collins, the son of a respected painter (whose biography would be one of his first publishing successes), escaped from the drudgery of a civil service career his father's idea while still in his early 20s by unleashing a torrent of novels, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces that ensured his literary fame. He befriended Charles Dickens, becoming his frequent collaborator on stories and amateur theatrical adaptations in which the two occasionally acted. Ackroyd (Charles Chaplin: A Brief Life) identifies "contemporary melodrama" as Collins's m tier. He was "a master of plot rather than of character" whose novels notably The Woman in White and The Moonstone (regarded as the first detective novel) are memorable for their suspense and narrative ingenuity. Collins also flouted Victorian mores and sometimes incensed critics with his realistic depictions of working-class life and the plight of women. The depiction of Collins as an artist afflicted with gout and neuralgia who worked himself to the brink of nervous prostration with each book he wrote makes him as interesting as one of his own fictional characters. Ackroyd's appraisal of his subject that "he breathed upon facts and kindled them into life" is applicable to his own achievement here.
