THE WOMAN IN WHITE Wilkie Collins
Tertulias literarias Literatur Solasaldiak Literary Circle
Errenteriako Biblioteka 2020 / 01 / 15
Wilkie Collins Wilkie Collins was born in London on Jan. 8, 1824, the son of a successful painter. Leaving school in his 16th year, he was apprenticed to a tea importer but had little enthusiasm for business. As a young man, he both wrote and painted. He published a number of articles and stories, exhibited a picture at the Royal Academy, and was an early supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His first published novel, Antonina, or the Fall of Rome (1850), was modeled on the historical fiction of the popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Collins met Charles Dickens in 1851 and became one of his closest friends. Most of his early stories and novels appeared in Dickens's magazines Household Words and All the Year Round, and through participation in Dickens's elaborate amateur theatricals he was encouraged to try his hand at drama. However, Collins's melodramas, although popular in their day, are now largely forgotten. Collins never married but maintained a rather enigmatic relationship with two women, one of whom lived with him for almost 30 years. He died on Sept. 23, 1889, after prolonged illness.
Selected Works Novels 路(1850) Antonina 路(1852) Basil 路(1854) Hide and Seek 路(1856) After Dark
·(1860) The Woman in White ·(1866) Armadale ·(1868) The Moonstone ·(1890) Blind Love (unfinished, completed by Walter Besant)
The Woman in White The Woman in White (1860), based on an incident that had occurred in France some 70 years earlier, marked the maturing of Collins's art and was an immediate popular success on both sides of the Atlantic. In it a scheme to rob a woman of her fortune turns on the existence of a mysterious double who dies and is substituted for the victim. The extraordinarily complex maneuvers of the villain are made even more mystifying by Collins's device of narrating the events through a series of limited observers.
Reviews · “Wilkie Collins's novel caused unprecedented excitement when it appeared in 1859, and has not lost its capacity to thrill ” (The Guardian) ·
“The Woman in White was the first great sensation novel. Roger Luckhurst
considers how Wilkie Collins's intricately plotted novel borrows elements from realist and Gothic fiction, and combines suspense and stimulation. ” (British Library)
Interesting links ·Life of Wilkie Collins, Grandfather of an English Detective Novel: ·https://www.thoughtco.com/wilkie-collins-biography-4172319
· The Woman in White Reader's Guide:
·https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/333095/the-woman-in-white-by-
wilkie-collins/9780141192420/readers-guide/
· Wilkie Collins Information Pages:
·https://www.wilkie-collins.info
· Our coordinator´s blog (ENG/ESP)
·https://donostiabookclub.blogspot.com