by wilkieco | Jun 12, 2013 | Articles
The plot of Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone relies heavily on the device of the legacy, and legacies – great, small, and merely hypothetical – crop up with astonishing frequency over the course of the novel. ((Ilana Blumberg views what I term “legacies” rather differently,...
by wilkieco | Jun 12, 2013 | Articles
Wilkie Collins died, after a prolonged period of ill-health, on 23 September 1889. The beginning of the end was signalled after he suffered a “paralytic stroke” on 30 June of that year, from which he never fully recovered (Robinson 321). Two days before his death,...
by wilkieco | Jun 10, 2013 | Reviews
A collection of essays on Victorian sensation fiction should be, like the genre itself, an entertaining read, and Pamela K. Gilbert’s A Companion to Sensation Fiction does not disappoint, proving to be a fascinating and scholarly collection of essays. The volume forms...
by wilkieco | Jun 10, 2013 | Reviews
The story of the composition of Wilkie Collins’s final work is almost as striking as that found in the novel itself. In the spring of 1887, soon after completing the revisions to the short stories collected in Little Novels and with several months left before he...
by wilkieco | Jun 10, 2013 | Reviews
Ronald Thomas begins playfully enough, with acknowledgments to colleagues who are likened to a series of “equally culpable suspects” in a mystery story and with a dedication to his “partner in life if not in crime” (xvii, xviii). But readers will quickly recognize in...
