Includes bibliographical references (pages 647-652).
Summary:
Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the elder son of a successful painter, William Collins. He left school at 17, and after an unhappy spell as a clerk in a tea broker's office, during which he wrote his first, unpublished novel, he entered Lincoln's Inn as a law student in 1846. He considered a career as a painter, but after the publication, in 1848, of his life of his father, and a novel, Antonina, in 1850, his future as a writer was assured. His meeting with Dickens in 1851 was perhaps the turning-point of his career. The two became collaborators and lifelong friends. Collins contributed to Dickens's magazines Household Words and All the Year Round, and his two best-known novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, were first published in All the Year Round. Collins's private life was as complex and turbulent as his novels. He never married, but lived with a widow, Mrs. Caroline Graves, from 1858 until his death. He also had three children by a younger woman, Martha Rudd, whom he kept in a separate establishment. Collins suffered from 'rheumatic gout', a form of arthritis which made him an invalid in his later years, and he became addicted to the laudanum he took to ease the pain of the illness. He died in 1889.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.