Wilkie Collins
1824–1889 · England
“There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Wilkie Collins
Inspired(1)
who Wilkie Collins shaped
via Dracula
- Collins built the machine that Dracula would later run on — a story told entirely through stacked eyewitness documents
- The Woman in White assembles its mystery from the testimony of multiple narrators, each only seeing a piece
- Stoker took that compiled-document architecture wholesale; reviewers of Dracula compared the two on exactly this structure
Portraits
The defining late-career photograph: Sarony's New York studio portrait of Collins at 50, taken during his 1873-74 American reading tour; bearded, bespectacled, signed (signature pasted later). The most-reproduced photo of him.
Napoleon Sarony, 1874
National Portrait Gallery oil (NPG 3333) of Collins in old age by his friend Rudolf Lehmann; the standard painted likeness of the elder novelist.
Rudolf Lehmann, 1880
Famous Quotes
“This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.”
“The fool's crime is the crime that is found out, and the wise man's crime is the crime that is NOT found out.”
“Any woman who is sure of her own wits is a match at any time for a man who is not sure of his own temper.”
“The best men are not consistent in good — why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”
About Wilkie Collins
English novelist and playwright, a close friend of Dickens and pioneer of the sensation novel. The Woman in White and The Moonstone established many conventions of the mystery and thriller genres. His complex plots, multiple narrators, and strong female characters were innovative for their time.