Wilkie Collins was born on 8 January 1824. So this year the Society is celebrating the bicentennial of this great Victorian author.
The Wilkie Collins Society was founded in 1980 to promote interest in the life and works of this important nineteenth-century writer. His best known works are The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But Wilkie Collins wrote more than twenty other novels and more than 60 short stories as well as 18 plays and numerous essays and pieces of journalism. His books have attracted readers for a more than a century and a half and his unconventional lifestyle has intrigued the literary world for nearly as long. More than 3400 of his letters have been collected and the Society publishes new discoveries as they are made.
Collins features prominently in works on Detective Fiction and the Sensation Novel and remains a subject of study for each new generation of scholars. New and scholarly editions of his books have been widely issued over the last fifty years and almost all his works are currently in print. There have been film, television, and radio productions of his best-known novels and many of his short stories.
The first major biography by Kenneth Robinson was published in 1951 and more than a dozen others have followed, the latest being Andrew Lycett’s Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation in 2013. Other notable biographers include Catherine Peters, William Clarke, and Peter Ackroyd.
The Wilkie Collins Society publishes a Newsletter three times a year as well as reprints of shorter and less well-known pieces written by Wilkie Collins. It also publishes pamphlets about his life and family, analysis of his writing and publications and other studies as new things are discovered about this enigmatic Victorian writer. See Publications drop down.
The Fourth Series of the Wilkie Collins Journal edited by Professor Graham Law will begin this year. See Journal drop down.
You can join here https://wilkiecollinssociety.org/join/