Wilkie Collins
 | Wilkie Collins (January 8, 1824 – September 23, 1889) was a British writer best known for his novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone. He was born in London the son of noted landscape painter William Collins and spent several years of his youth abroad with his family in Italy and France. He began telling stories at boarding school when he was forced by a bully to tell a story before he could sleep. He left school at sixteen and spent five years as a clerk in a firm of tea merchants, during which time he published his first story and wrote his first novel. At the urging of his father, he entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1846 to study law, graduating in 1851. That same year he met Charles Dickens and began a lifelong friendship. During the 1850’s his writing expanded to include articles, essays, criticism and travel books. In this decade Collins began to suffer from gout, for which he took laudanum. In the 1860s he published The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone, which secured both his reputation and financial stability. Collins never married but in 1858 began living with Caroline Graves and her daughter, who he considered family. Ten years later he began a liaison with Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children, and thereafter divided his time between the two women. In his last decade his health declined and he became increasingly dependent on laudanum. He died following a stroke in 1889. |
The Woman in White
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is widely considered the first in the genre of “sensation” nove..
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