The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  Ashley, Robert. Wilkie Collins. New York: Roy, 1952.

  —. “Wilkie Collins and the Detective Story.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 6 (1951): 47–60.

  —. “Wilkie Collins and the Dickensians.” The Dickensian 49 (1953): 59–65.

  Blair, David. “Wilkie Collins and the Crisis of Suspense.” Reading the Victorian Novel: Detail into Form. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1980.

  Booth, Bradford. “Wilkie Collins and the Art of Fiction.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 6 (1951): 131–43.

  Compton-Rickett, Arthur. “Wilkie Collins.” Bookman (London) 42 (1912): 107–14.

  Davis, Earle. The Flint and the Flame: The Artistry of Charles Dickens. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963.

  Davis, Nuel Pharr. The Life of Wilkie Collins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956.

  De la Mare, Walter. “The Early Novels of Wilkie Collins.” The Eighteen Sixties, Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, ed. John Drinkwater. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932.

  Eliot, T. S. “Wilkie Collins and Dickens.” (London) Times Literary Supplement, 4 August 1924, pp. 525–6. Rpt. in Selected Essays, 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947.

  Ellis, S. M. Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu, and Others. London: Constable, 1931.

  Elwin, Malcolm. Victorian Wallflowers. London: Cape, 1934.

  Fielding, K. J. “Dickens and Wilkie Collins, A Reply.” The Dickensian 49 (1953): 130–6.

  Hutter, Albert D. “Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction.” Victorian Studies 19 (1975): 181–209.

  Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 Vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952.

  Lambert, Gavin. The Dangerous Edge. New York: Grossman, 1976.

  Marshall, William H. Wilkie Collins. New York: Twayne, 1970.

  McCleary, G. F. “A Victorian Classic.” The Fortnightly Review 166 (1946): 137–41.

  Page, Norman, ed. Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.

  Phillips, Walter C. Dickens, Reade, and Collins, Sensation Novelists: A Study in the Conditions and Theories of Novel Writing in Victorian England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1919.

  Pritchett, V. S. “The Roots of Detection.” Books in General. London: Chatto & Windus, 1953.

  Robinson, Kenneth. Wilkie Collins: A Biography. London: Bodley Head, 1951.

  Sayers, Dorothy L. Wilkie Collins: A Critical and Biographical Study, ed. E. R. Gregory. Toledo, OH: Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries, 1977.

  Symons, Julian. Mortal Consequences: A History, from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

  Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “Wilkie Collins.” The Fortnightly Review 52 (1889): 589–99. Rpt. in Volume 15 of The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise. The Bonchurch Edition. London: Heinemann, 1925–7.

  Winks, Robin W. Modus Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction. Boston: David Godine, 1981.

  WILKIE COLLINS was born William Wilkie Collins in London in 1824, the eldest son of a successful painter, William Collins. He studied law and was admitted to the bar but never practiced his nominal profession, devoting his time to writing instead. His first published book was a biography of his father, his second a florid historical romance. The first hint of his later talents came with Basil (1852), a vivid tale of seduction, treachery, and revenge.

  In 1851 Collins had met Charles Dickens, who would become his close friend and mentor. Collins was soon writing unsigned articles and stories for Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, and his novels were serialized in its pages. Collins brought out the boyish, adventurous side of Dickens’s character; the two novelists traveled to Italy, Switzerland, and France together, and their travels produced such lighthearted collaborations as “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.” They also shared a passion for the theater, and Collins’s melodramas, notably The Frozen Deep, were presented by Dickens’s private company, with Dickens and Collins in leading roles.

  Collins’s first mystery novel was Hide and Seek (1853). His first popular success was The Woman in White (1860), followed by No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868), whose Sergeant Cuff became a prototype of the detective hero in English fiction. Collins’s concentration on the seamier side of life did not endear him to the critics of his day, but he was among the most popular of Victorian novelists. His meticulously plotted, often violent novels are now recognized as the direct ancestors of the modern mystery novel and thriller.

  Collins’s private life was an open secret among his friends. He had two mistresses, one of whom bore him three children. His later years were marred by a long and painful eye disease. His novels, increasingly didactic, declined greatly in quality, but he continued to write by dictating to a secretary until 1886. He died in 1889.