THE INVENTOR OF WHAT became known as the “sensation” novel and one of the most popular and highest paid of all Victorian novelists, (William) Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was a friend and frequent collaborator of Charles Dickens’s and author of two of the greatest novels in the history of mystery fiction, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868).
Born in London, the son of the very successful landscape painter William Collins, a member of the Royal Academy, Collins received a law degree but never practiced, deciding to become a full-time writer instead. Over the course of his life, he published twenty-five novels, fifteen plays, more than fifty short stories, and over a hundred nonfiction articles. He met Dickens in 1851 and soon cowrote a play with him, The Frozen Deep, then collaborated with him on short stories, articles, etc. When Dickens founded a magazine, All the Year Round, in 1859, Collins assured its success by serializing The Woman in White in its pages. He later wrote Christmas stories for the periodical, and serialized the long novel No Name (1862) and, in 1868, the classic The Moonstone, which T. S. Eliot described as “the first, the longest, and the best” detective novel of all time. Collins adapted The Woman in White for the stage in 1871; it has been filmed frequently, beginning with a Pathe silent in 1917 but most memorably in 1948 with Alexis Smith, Eleanor Parker, Gig Young, and Sydney Greenstreet as the evil Count Fosco. The Moonstone was also dramatized by Collins, opening in 1877; it has been filmed at least five times, first as a 1909 silent, followed by a 1915 silent, then as a lackluster 1934 low-budget film, as a garrulous five-hour BBC production in 1972, and again as a BBC production in 1997.
“The Dream Woman” was originally published in the Christmas 1855 issue of Household Words with the title “The Ostler”; it was first collected in The Queen of Hearts (London, Hurst & Blackett, 1859) with the title “Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dream Woman.”