Novelist, born in London, UK. He spent four years in business, then entered Lincoln's Inn to train as a lawyer, but gradually took to literature, becoming a master of the mystery story. His best-known works are The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), the first full-length detective story in the English language.
William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and writer of short stories.
Life
Collins was born in London, the son of a well-known landscape artist, William Collins. (Iolani remained unpublished for over 150 years until 1999.) After his father's death in 1847, Collins produced his first published book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848), and also considered a career in painting, exhibiting a picture at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1849, but it was with the publication of his first published novel Antonina in 1850 that his career as a writer began in earnest. several of Collins' novels were serialised in Dickens' weekly publication All the Year Round, and Dickens later edited and published them himself.
Collins suffered from a form of arthritis known as 'rheumatic gout' and became severely addicted to the opium that he took (in the form of laudanum) to relieve the pain. His novel The Moonstone prominently features the effects of opium and opium addiction. His grave notes him as the author of The Woman in White. Like many writers of his time, he published most of his novels as serials in magazines such as Dickens's All the Year Round, and was known as a master of the form, creating just the right degree of suspense to keep his audience reading from week to week. (Sales of All The Year Round actually increased when The Woman in White succeeded A Tale of Two Cities.)
He enjoyed ten years of great success following publication of The Woman in White in 1859. "Armadale", (the first and only of Collins' major novels of the 1860s to be serialised in a magazine other than Dickens' "All The Year Round") provoked strong criticism, generally centred around its transgressive villainess Lydia Gwilt; The novel was both a financial coup for its author and yet, nevertheless, a comparative commercial failure: the sum paid by the Cornhill magazine for the serialisation rights was exceptional, eclipsing the prices paid for the vast majority of similar novels by a substantial margin, yet the novel itself failed to recoup its publishers' investment. The Moonstone, published in 1868, and the last novel of what is generally regarded as the most successful decade of its authors' career was, despite a somewhat cool reception from both Dickens and the critics, a significant return to form and reestablished the market value of an author whose success in the competitive Victorian literary marketplace had been gradually waning in the wake of his first "masterpiece." and a somewhat ill-advised penchant for utilising his fiction to rail against social issues) appear to have led to a decline in the two decades following the success of his sensation novels of the 1860s and prior to his death in 1879;
The Woman in White and The Moonstone share an unusual narrative structure, somewhat resembling an epistolary novel, in which different portions of the book have different narrators, each with a distinctive narrative voice.
After The Moonstone, Collins's novels contained fewer thriller elements and more social commentary.
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