Introduction –Neo-Victorian Collins: Legacies and Afterlives

 

Claire O’Callaghan and Jessica Cox

Loughborough University and Brunel University London

 

This special issue of The Wilkie Collins Journal explores Collins’s influence on neo-Victorianism: his legacy and afterlives in the literature and culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The process of adapting, revisiting, and reimagining Collins’s oeuvre, however, dates back to the nineteenth century and to Collins himself.  The first stage adaptation of his most successful novel, The Woman in White (1860), appeared – in a pirated production at the Surrey Theatre in London – in November 1860: a mere ten weeks after it concluded its serial publication in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round. Multiple other theatrical adaptations appeared in the decades that followed, and several of Collins’s other novels were also adapted for the stage in the nineteenth century – including some by Collins himself.[1] His fellow Victorian writers also turned to his work for inspiration for their own fiction: his influence is evident in multiple sensation novels,[2] in Dickens’s final unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four (1890).[3] Authors, playwrights, and screenwriters continued to revisit and reimagine Collins’s work throughout the twentieth century, and this trend has persisted in the twenty-first century. As Rachel Malik (2006) notes,

the history of Wilkie Collins in the twentieth century encompasses some of the earliest silent films, the changing traditions and conventions of BBC radio and television drama, and the historical fiction of Sarah Waters, James Wilson and other ‘contemporary Victorian’ writers. It forms a crucial part of the continuities and shifts in the significance of the ‘Victorian’ across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. (1)

This history of cultural reinterpretations of Collins’s life and work, dating back to Collins’s own literary career, inevitably raises significant questions in a Special Issue on Neo-Victorian Collins: perhaps most pertinently, when do these adaptations and reworkings become Neo-Victorian, and what do we mean by this somewhat disputed critical term?

In 2013, William Baker and Andrew Gasson acknowledged that there has always been a constant interest in Wilkie Collins amongst both contemporary and modern creative writers. In addition to [Anthony] Trollope and […] Hall Caine, James Payne and Edmund Yates, other contemporaries appreciative of Collins include Swinburne, Andrew Lang and Rider Haggard’ (xiv).

As they suggest, in the twentieth century, Collins continued to influence numerous writers, including “T.S Eliot [,] A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare, Hugh Walpole, Dorothy Sayers and, later in the century Eudora Welty and P. D. James”, and this influence quickly posited Collins as the “gold standard” to which writers of crime and mystery aspired (xiv-xvi). As Baker goes on to note, even “a reviewer of Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (1989) suggested that the novel’s plot was of an intricacy that Wilkie Collins himself might have envied” (online).[4] What is notable about Baker and Gasson’s insights here is how ideas of legacy and influence begin to mingle with references to acknowledged neo-Victorian works, as the allusion to Palliser’s novel indicates. There is no delineation between the invocation of Collins as a mechanism for the reviewer to speak admirably about Palliser’s door-stopping text and an unpacking of Collins’s literary shadow. This special issue of The Wilkie Collins Journal begins to do just that and consider how an engagement with Collins’s life and work by twentieth- and twenty-first century authors both speaks back to Collins and reworks and reimagines the author and his writing in and for contemporary culture. As we hope this special issue will show, the way in which plots, tropes, and images of and by Collins linger in the contemporary imagination tells us as much about our relation to the nineteenth-century past as they do about Collins’s literary legacy.

The term ‘neo-Victorian’ was cemented as the favoured critical term for scholars investigating the cultural afterlives of Victorian literature and culture in 2008, with the establishment of the online journal, Neo-Victorian Studies. Early critical definitions tend to date the genre from the postmodern fiction of authors such as Jean Rhys and John Fowles in the 1960s. In 2010, Ann Heillmann and Mark Llewellyn proposed an influential definition of the form, arguing that the term ‘neo-Victorian’ refers to works that are “in some respect […] self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 4), but in recent years the perceived boundaries of the genre have shifted, moving the temporal origins back to the early decades of the twentieth century, and recognizing the contribution made by popular fiction and culture. This expansion in critical understandings of neo-Victorianism is reflected in the essays included here, which focus not only on ‘literary’ fiction but also include discussions of popular literature, including detective and Young Adult fiction. Nonetheless, all of the works explored in this Special Issue engage in multiple and often complex ways with Collins’s life and work, and both speak back to Collins from the vantage of the present, and rework and reimagine his life and his writing in and for modern culture. Broadly speaking, then, we define ‘neo Victorian’ in relation to Collins as referring to a range of twentieth and twenty-first century works which engage with and rework his oeuvre and biography, and in doing so speak to later social and cultural concerns, contemporaneous with the period of production.

Adaptations and reimaginings of Collins’s life and work since the close of the Victorian period number in the hundreds: numerous stage, film, television, radio, and literary works – in a multitude of genres – all exhibit signs of his influence. Collins’s best-selling novel, The Woman in White (1860), has proved the most popular in terms of creative returns to his work, and has been consistently adapted across mediums since its initial publication. In addition to the dozens of stage adaptations – most notably in recent years, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical spectacular (2004-2006; 2017-2018) – there have been numerous screen adaptations, from the 1912 silent short (Gem Motion Picture Company) to the 2018 five-part BBC television series, not to mention various reworkings on radio.[5]  The Moonstone (1868) has also proved a popular source text, and has been reproduced in multiple different guises, including television and film – from a silent short in 1911 (Charles Urban Trading Company) to the five-part television adaptation in 2016 (BBC) – and several radio adaptations (including 1945 [NBC] and 2011 [BBC]). Recently, it was reproduced by Screen 14 for YouTube (2019). Both works have also been adapted into graphic novels: The Moonstone was adapted by Marvel Classics in 1974, inaugurating a tradition of graphic reworkings of Collins’s work which continues globally today, thus demonstrating the transmedia afterlife of Collins’s writing and giving new meaning to the relationship between image and text found in the author’s own works.[6] Alongside these two novels, several of Collins’s other works have also been adapted for screen and radio, including The New Magdalen (1873), The Dead Secret (1856), Basil (1852), and Armadale (1864), along with shorter works, including ‘The Haunted Hotel’ (1878), but The Woman in White and The Moonstone remain the most popular of Collins’s works in terms of their influence on twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture.[7]

Beyond these various screen, stage, radio, and visual adaptations, Collins’s life and works have been appropriated more widely by neo-Victorian authors, writing in a multitude of subgenres.  Inevitably, given the influence of The Woman in White and The Moonstone, there are multiple examples of (neo-) Gothic and detective fiction which reimagine and rework elements of Collins’s novels. Literary Gothic returns to The Woman in White include Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994), Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002), Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), and John Harwood’s The Asylum (2013). James’s Wilson’s The Dark Clue (2001) is both a biofiction centred on artist J. M. W. Turner and a sequel to The Woman in White. Collins appears as a character in a range of fictional works, including William J. Palmer’s The Detective and Mr Dickens (1990) and the three subsequent works in the series (1992-2001), Jeff Rackham’s The Rag and Bone Shop (2002), and Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009), whilst he makes a brief appearance in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). Detective fiction from the Victorian period onwards evidences the influence of Collins’s The Moonstone, including works by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and, more recently, Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006) and The Glass of Time (2008). Several children’s and Young Adult (YA) novels also draw on The Woman in White and The Moonstone, including Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke (1985), Linda Newbery’s Set in Stone (2006), Jane Eagland’s Wildthorn (2009), and Jordan Stratford’s The Case of the Missing Moonstone (2015). Waters’s Fingersmith and Eagland’s Wildthorn also represent Queer reimaginings of The Woman in White. Other recent returns to Collins’s work include Brenda W. Clough’s audio series, A Most Dangerous Woman (2018), a serialisation which picks up where The Woman in White ended and reworks some of the gendered images associated with Marian Halcombe. The diversity of Collins’s neo-Victorian literary legacy is evidenced in this special issue, which includes explorations of Collins’s influence on Golden Age detective fiction, YA fiction, Biofiction, contemporary Gothic writing, and historical fantasy fiction.

The question, of course, though, is ‘why?’ Why should Collins’s biography and fiction extend into and across modern culture and be repeatedly reworked for later audiences? After all, as Andrew Lycett notes, “it is an irony typical of Wilkie that his expansive novels should return to fashion at a time when people’s attention spans have been reduced by exposure to electronic media” (420). But, as he goes on to note, it is, perhaps, “a testament to his sheer page-turning readability” (420). Whilst neo-Victorian works have attracted considerable critical attention, they also attract significant popular interest, so it is perhaps unsurprising that Collins’s Victorian bestsellers should provide fertile ground for those revisiting the period in contemporary fiction. Beyond readability, while Collins’s plots, characters and concerns are undoubtedly amenable for appropriation and adaptation by contemporary authors, screenwriters, playwrights, and graphic artists, it is also, perhaps, that, as Daniel Martin indicates, Collins had a “taste for stories of disaffected, outcast, fallen, afflicted, melancholic, and transgressive social identities” (185). In this respect, Collins’s literary interests map directly onto the thematic concerns of many neo-Victorian works, which, as Mark Llewellyn argues, “desire to re-write the historical narrative of that period by representing marginalised voices, new histories of sexuality, post-colonial viewpoints and other generally ‘different’ versions of the Victorian” (Llewellyn 165). The sensation fiction of Collins and other Victorian writers provides valuable insights into mid-Victorian social and cultural concerns, including anxieties around class and gender roles, and the (often traumatic) experiences of marginalised figures. To this end, then, contemporary works which return to these Victorian narratives frequently parallel their nineteenth-century predecessors via their concern with the marginalised, and their exploration of, for instance, contemporary anxieties around gender, abuse, and power.

Adaptations and reimaginings of, and neo-Victorian literary and cultural returns to Collins’s life and work have attracted considerable critical attention to date. These explorations of Collins’s legacy and cultural afterlives are not all situated specifically in relation to neo-Victorian critical discourses. Works such as Lyn Pykett’s Wilkie Collins in Context (2005) and The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins (2006) predate the extensive scholarly debates around neo-Victorianism and its meanings, but nonetheless conclude with explorations of Collins’s legacy, and discuss various stage, screen, and literary adaptations of his work. Several articles to date discuss specific adaptations of Collins’s work, though again not always in relation to critical debates around neo-Victorianism.[8] More recently, critical discussions of Collins’s afterlives have tended to engage more broadly with the issue of neo-Victorianism specifically.  This is evident various works, including Pykett’s The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel (2011), which concludes with a discussion of the “sensation legacy”, including the “neo-sensation novel” (126-8) and The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011), in which Grace Moore discusses the relationship between the Victorian sensation novel and neo-Victorian work. Cultural returns to Collins’s work are also discussed at length – in conjunction with a critical interrogation of neo-Victorianism – in Jessica Cox’s Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction (2019), which includes discussions of the sensational afterlives of Collins’s work, particularly The Woman in White, in relation to a range of issues, including sexual trauma, the neo-Gothic, and popular culture.

Despite these important scholarly works, Collins remains, in neo-Victorian studies, largely neglected, at least when compared to the extant body of work devoted to his friend, Charles Dickens, whose legacy and afterlife have been the subject of numerous articles and book chapters, conference, special issues and, most recently, books.[9] So why might this be the case? As Cox asserts in Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction, much neo-Victorian study has, thus far, tended to focus on “highbrow” reimaginings of sensation fiction, as “appropriate forms for critical investigation” (4): the works of critically acclaimed authors such as A. S. Byatt, Charles Palliser, and Sarah Waters.[10] It is these literary reworkings of Collins’s novels that have received the most critical attention in neo-Victorian scholarship – reflecting those critical definitions of neo-Victorianism (emphasising textual self-conscious engagement) such as that proposed by Heilmann and Llewellyn, that were, until recently, widely accepted. However, Collins’s influence and legacy extends across both literary and popular forms. So, while The Woman in White has been reworked in a queer context via Waters’s Booker-nominated Fingersmith (2003), popular reworkings of Collins’s work, such as Victoria Holt’s Shivering Sands (1969) and recent YA works, are yet to receive extensive critical attention. Indeed, that Collins’s influence extends into what might be termed ‘popular’ or ‘low brow’ literary forms is undeniable, for as John Mullan has argued, the rise of the contemporary psychological thriller has its roots in Collins’s writing. As Mullan sees it, in “his great novels of the 1860s, Collins invented a series of narrative tricks and peculiar plot elements that thriller writers still draw on.” (online). Mullan goes on to identify a range of implicit links between Paula Hawkins’s bestseller, The Girl on the Train (2015), The Moonstone, and Armadale. But direct invocations of Collins’s work can also be found elsewhere in contemporary psychological thrillers, including Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, Sharp Objects (2006), in which in which the serial murders of various children in the Wind Gap, Missouri, are haunted by a mysterious ‘woman in white’ who has been seen at the site of each child’s murder, while the narrator, Camille, struggles with the death of her sister, Marion. Despite these connections, neo-Victorian scholarship continues to privilege “literary writers and exclude popular fiction” from critical appraisal (Cox 7), something that is, now, beginning to shift, but which has to date prevented a fuller understanding of the Victorian literary inheritance in contemporary literature and culture.

Another reason why Collins has yet to receive the critical attention he warrants within neo-Victorian studies might also be found in the fact that, as mentioned, primacy continues to be given to the life of work of Collins’s friend: Charles Dickens. As Emily Bell has noted, Dickens’s reputation and influence are such that the term “Dickensian” is now synonymous with the “Victorian” itself, meaning that despite the popularity of numerous other writers from the period, the Dickensian legacy casts a long shadow over the field (p. 3). Indeed, in the thirteen years since Neo-Victorian Studies (the field’s only dedicated journal) first appeared, Dickens is the only Victorian author whose legacy have warranted a special issue devoted exclusively to their literary and cultural afterlives.[11] Interestingly, as noted earlier, Collins has been fictionalised in several neo-Victorian texts, but these are nearly always works that focus on or include Dickens as well. It is our hope that the upcoming bicentenary of Collins’s birth in 2024 will present new opportunities for creative interpretations of Collins’s life and work, and further consideration of his legacy, afterlife and influence in modern culture.

The aim of this special issue is to widen critical dialogue on Collins with respect to his neo-Victorian legacy and afterlife, and to elucidate further the ways in which his work has shaped – and continues to shape – the contemporary cultural imagination. In doing so, we seek not just to focus on Collins, but to expand the critical discourses on neo-Victorianism. For example, as Indu Ohri’s article on the influence of Collins’s writing on Agatha Christie indicates, with a recognition of the important intertextual relationship between these writers taking place in the early twentieth century, the continued effort to acknowledge the presence of neo-Victorianism much earlier than 1966 (so often marked by the publication of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea – her reworking of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre [1847]) is established through Collins’s genealogy of influence. In addition, we seek to further expand critical dialogue within neo-Victorianism more broadly, responding to Marie-Luise Kolhke’s call for a further exploration of the diversity of neo-Victorian fictions, their agendas and politics (Kohlke 25) by grappling with how Collins’s literary afterlives have been the basis for contemporary works concerned with the legacy of racial oppression and empire, sexuality, gender, sexuality, and violence. As several of the articles here will demonstrate, neo-Victorian reworkings of Collins’s life and work are apposite vehicles for engaging with modern political movements, such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, thus making it “possible to explore continuities as well as differences across media and time” and “opening up the idea of ‘adaptation’ that is neither transhistorical (accurately reproducing the original) nor narrowly bound within its own time” (Malik 1).

The articles presented in this special issue contribute to the growing body of work devoted to the way in which Collins’s works have been revisioned, reappraised and transformed beyond the nineteenth century. Beginning with a discussion of Collins’s early twentieth-century legacy, Indu Ohri’s article examines the influence of The Moonstone and The Woman in White on two of Agatha Christie’s short stories: “The Adventure of ‘The Western Star’” and “The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman”, respectively, both of which are included in her collection Poirot Investigates (1924). Ohri argues that Christie’s stories deliberately engage with aspects of Collins’s work, and can be read as historiographic metafictions, and thus represent early examples of neo-Victorian fiction. Neo-Victorian engagement with The Moonstone is also the subject of Kimberly Cox’s article, which explores the novel alongside Phillip Pullman’s neo-sensation YA novel, The Ruby in the Smoke. Reading both texts from a contemporary perspective in the age of the #Metoo movement, Cox examines the marginalisation of female characters in these works, arguing that both narratives work to erase the stories of these characters, whose precariousness and powerlessness take on new meaning in light of contemporary debates around women and abuse. Beth Sherman’s article is also concerned with the role of women in neo-Victorian literary returns to Collins’s work, examining the figure of the female detective in Waters’s Fingersmith and Wilson’s The Dark Clue and arguing that the cultural, sexual and gendered reconfiguration of the detective figure in these texts moves the narratives beyond nostalgic appropriation and enables an assertion of female power and identity. Whilst the influence of Collins’s two most successful novels is evident in the articles by Ohri, Cox, and Sherman, Melissa Purdue, in her contribution, explores the parallels between contemporary historical fantasy fiction and one of Collins’s lesser-known works, examining representations of Gothic tropes, including supernatural creatures and the figure of the scientist, in Collins’s Heart and Science (1882) and Gail Carriger’s neo-Victorian ‘Parasol Protectorate’ series of novels (2009-2012). Purdue’s article echoes wider neo-Victorian critical concerns in its exploration of the treatment of socially marginalised figures in Carriger’s work. The final article in this Special Issue focuses on Dan Simmons’s 2009 biofiction, Drood, exploring authorial and biofictional identities in relation to Collin’s narrative authority in this neo-Victorian novel, and working to remove Collins from Dickens’s shadow. It seems appropriate that a Special Issue dedicated to Neo-Victorian Collins should close with an article which is both an acknowledgement of the long shadow cast by Dickens over Collins’s legacy and neo-Victorian works more broadly, and an attempt to shed critical light on Collins’s significance in this field.

Together these articles contribute to the ongoing critical expansion of Collins’s legacy and afterlives (and that of the Victorian sensation novel more generally) within the field of neo-Victorian studies. Collins’s life and work continue to attract considerable creative and critical attention. Whilst The Woman in White and The Moonstone will undoubtedly persist in terms of their ongoing appeal to playwrights, screenwriters, and novelists, Collins’s oeuvre extends to some two dozen novels, as well as multiple short stories, non-fiction works, and plays. This leaves much scope for further neo-Victorian creative returns to his work, whilst the details of his life – and his relationship with Dickens – will no doubt continue to provoke interest. In addition, there remain many creative works which reimagine, adapt, or rework Collins’s life and work which have yet to receive significant critical attention. This Special Issue, then, contributes to what will inevitably be an ongoing critical tradition, as, almost two hundred years after his birth, Collins continues to speak to our contemporary cultural moment. 

Bibliography

 Baker, William. ‘Wilkie Collins Scholarship and Criticism: Past, Present and Future.’ 2013, The Wilkie Collins Society, <https://wilkiecollinssociety.org/wilkie-collins-scholarship-and-criticism-past-present-and-future/>Accessed November 2020.

Baker, William and Andrew Gasson (eds). Wilkie Collins: Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, volume 2. Pickering and Chatto, 2007.

Bell, Emily. ‘Introduction’, Dickens After Dickens, edited by Bell, White Rose Press, 2020, 1-14.

Boyce, Charlotte, and Elodie Rousselot, eds. ‘The Other Dickens: Neo-Victorian Appropriation and Adaptation’, Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, 5:2 (2012).

Brantlinger, Patrick. ‘What Is “Sensational” About the “Sensation Novel”?’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37: 1 (1982), 1-28.

Brusberg-Kiermeier, Stefani. ‘Detecting Buried Secrets: Recent Film Versions of The Woman in White and The Moonstone’, in Andrew Mangham, ed. Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

Cox, Jessica. Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Fusco, Carla. ‘Some Things are Better Left Unsaid: The Dark Clue, or the Perilous Path of a Neo-Victorian Novel’, British and American Studies 25 (2019). 55-61.

Glavin, John, ed. Dickens Adapted. Routledge, 2017.

Heilmann, Ann and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Kohlke, Marie-Luise. ‘Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein: Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure, and Uncertain Metal’ in Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne and Gruss, eds. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2014, 21-37.

Llewellyn, Mark. ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’, Neo-Victorian Studies 1:1 (2008), 164-85.

Lycett, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation. Hutchison, 2013.

Malik, Rachel. ‘The Afterlife of Wilkie Collins’ in Jenny Bourne Taylor, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Cambridge University Press, 2006, 181-193.

Marsh, Kelly A. ‘The Neo-Sensation Novel: A Contemporary Genre in the Victorian Tradition’, Philological Quarterly 74:1 (Winter 1995), 99-123.

Martin, Daniel. ‘Wilkie Collins and Risk’ in Pamela K. Gilbert, ed. A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Blackwell, 2011, 184 -195.

Moore, Grace. ‘Neo-Victorian and Pastiche’ in Pamela K. Gilbert, ed. A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Blackwell, 2011, 627-38.

Mullan, John. ‘How we got to The Girl on the Train’, The Guardian, 16 October 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/08/how-we-got-to-the-girl-on-the-train-moonstone-the-rise-of-the-psychological-thriller

Pykett, Lyn. The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel. 2^nd edition. Northcote House, 2011.

Salah, Christiana. ‘“This Picture Always Haunted Me”: Dramatic Adaptations of The Woman in White’, Neo-Victorian Studies 3:2 (2010), 32-55.

[1] Collins’s own stage adaptation of The Woman in White appeared in 1871, and he adapted a number of his other works for the stage, including No Name (1862) and The Moonstone (1868).

[2] Both Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) – published shortly after The Woman in White and likewise seen as defining works of the sensation genre – appear to adapt elements of Collins’s novel.

[3] The influence of The Moonstone is evident in both Edwin Drood and The Sign of Four.

[4] Baker summarised these points in his keynote lecture for the Victorian Popular Fiction Association in 2013, a copy of which can be found on The Wilkie Collins Society website: https://wilkiecollinssociety.org/wilkie-collins-scholarship-and-criticism-past-present-and-future/

[5] Other notable stage and screen adaptations include Tim Kelly’s stage version, Egad, The Woman in White (1975), Constance Cox’s play of 2005, further silent screen productions in 1917, 1921 and 1929, film adaptions in 1940, 1948, and 1982, and mini-series for television were in 1971 (Germany), 1980 (Italy), 1997 (UK) and 2018 (UK). The BBC produced radio adaptations of the novel in 1969 and 2001.

[6] Art and illustration appear prominently in several of Collins’s novels. Professional artists appear in Hide and Seek and The Woman in White, alongside more decorative and amateur painters, who also appear in The Moonstone.  Troubling images and paintings are found in Miserrimus Dexter’s abode in The Law and the Lady.  John Millais, of course, also provided the frontispiece to the 1864 Sampson and Law edition of No Name. For more on this see ‘Wilkie Collins and his Illustrators’ in Nelson and Smith and R.C. Terry (eds), Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments (AMS Press, 1995).  In contemporary culture, both The Woman in White and The Moonstone have been reworked as graphic pieces by Classics Illustrated, and more recently, The Law and the Lady and The Haunted Hotel were reworked in graphic form in French (2006/7, 2012/14).

[7] Adaptations of these works include silent shorts of The New Magdalen (1912), The Dead Secret (1913), and Armadale (1916), a big screen adaptation of Basil (1998), and radio adaptations of Armadale (2009) and The Haunted Hotel (2012).

[8] These are too numerous to list in full here, but examples include Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier’s work on film adaptations of The Woman in White and The Moonstone (2008), Christiana Salah’s article on dramatic adaptations of The Woman in White (2010), and Carla Fusco’s article on Wilson’s The Dark Clue (2019).

[9] See, for example, Boyce and Rousselot (2012), Glavin (2017), Bell (2020).

[10] See Marsh (1995), Moore (2011).

[11] See ‘The Other Dickens: Neo-Victorian Appropriation and Adaptation’ edited by Charlotte Boyce and Elodie Rousselot. Neo-Victorian Studies, 5:2 (2012), pp. 1-201.