Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life A Literary Life

This new volume in theLiterary Livesseries focuses on the career of the popular Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), and provides a new account of his professional life in the literary world of nineteenth-century Britain. It draws on recently available business and personal correspondence to establish a fresh portrait of one of Victorian Britain's busiest authors, taking in Collins's notoriously complicated private life and his friendship with Charles Dickens, as well his work as journalist, reviewer and playwright. New insights are given into the international dimensions of Collins's career. There is discussion of Collins's best-known novels, includingThe Woman in White,The MoonstoneandArmadale, but attention is also given to lesser-known works and to Collins's plays, which have long been neglected. The volume will appeal to all students of Wilkie Collins and also to those interested in the literary world of Victorian Britain and the social and business networks which lay at its heart.

GRAHAM LAW is Professor in Media Studies at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (2000) and editor of the Wilkie Collins Society Journal.

ANDREW MAUNDER is Lecturer in English at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He is the author of Bram Stoker (2006) and the editor of the series Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction (2005).