BIBLIOGRAPHIES
There is no exhaustive and accurate bibliography of Wilkie Collins’s writings. Among the most recent are: R. V. Andrew, Wilkie Collins: a Critical Survey of his Prose Fiction, with a bibliography (1979); R. Ashley, ‘Wilkie Collins’ in Victorian Fiction: a Second Guide to Research, ed. G. H. Ford (1978); K. H. Beetz, Wilkie Collins: an Annotated Bibliography, 1889-1976; and Andrew Gasson, Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide (1998). Also helpful in charting the complicated publishing history of many Wilkie Collins’s novels and stories are: M. L. Parrish, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade: First editions, with a few exceptions, in the library at Dormy House (1940); M. Sadleir, Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1951), vol. 1, pp. 376–7, and vol. 2, p. 27; Andrew Gasson, ‘Wilkie Collins: a collector’s and bibliographer’s challenge’, Private Library, 3, pp. 51–77; and Robert L. Wolff, ‘Wilkie Collins’, in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, a bibliographical catalogue (1981–6), VOL. 1, pp. 254–72.
BIOGRAPHIES
The most comprehensive and most recent biography is The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, by Catherine Peters (London, 1991, 1992). William M. Clarke’s The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1988) deals mainly with Collins’s private life, mentioning his writing only where relevant to the events of his life. The earlier biography by Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins (London, 1951; reprinted 1974) is still of interest, as are the four chapters of Dorothy Sayers’s unfinished Wilkie Collins: A Biographical and Critical Study, ed. E. R. Gregory (Toledo, Oh., 1977).
CRITICAL AND BACKGROUND STUDIES
Armadale, for long largely neglected by the critics, has in recent years increasingly attracted attention, particularly from those interested in Victorian views of women in life and fiction. Norman Page, Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (1974), includes several of the (mostly unfavourable) contemporary assessments of Armadale, and also one of the best nineteenth-century critical essays on Collins, by Swinburne, which includes a passage on Armadale. It is interesting that the first critics to take the novel seriously were all poets. T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘Wilkie Collins and Dickens’, Selected Essays (1932), and Walter de la Mare, ‘The Early Novels of Wilkie Collins’ in The Eighteen-Sixties, ed. John Drinkwater (1932), also discuss Armadale. W. H. Marshall, in Wilkie Collins (1970), still one of the best general literary studies, sees Armadale as ‘primarily an exploration of the nature of guilt’. Winifred Hughes’s study of the sensation novels of the 1860s, The Maniac in the Cellar (1980), gives the literary context. She perceives an unresolved tension in Armadale between Collins’s desire for pattern in art and his perception of the lack of it in contemporary life. R. Barickman, S. MacDonald, and M. Stark, in Corrupt Relations: Dickens. Thackeray, Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and the Victorian Sexual System (1982), consider Armadale contains a deliberate mockery of the usual function of courtship in the Victorian novel. D. Blair, ‘Wilkie Collins and the crisis of suspense’, in Reading the Victorian Novel: Detail into Form, ed. Ian Gregor (1980), discusses the deliberate tensions set up between detail and the overarching demands of plot and structure. Jenny Bourne Taylor, in one of the most impressively scholarly books on Collins I have come across, In The Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, sensation narrative, and nineteenth-century psychology (1988), includes a chapter on Armadale, ‘The sensitive subject as palimpsest’. Her book ranks with Sue Lonoff’s Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: a study in the rhetoric of authorship (1982), which though less directly illuminating about Armadale is essential background reading. Phillip O’Neill’s Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety (1988), takes a less subtle view of Collins, as a novelist intent on subverting contemporary ideas about the role of women. N. Schroeder, ‘Armadale: “A Book That is Daring Enough to Speak the Truth”’, Wilkie Collins Society Journal, 3 (1983), pp. 5–16, also takes the view that the women in Armadale—Neelie Milroy as well as Lydia Gwilt—are ‘more masculine than the men—they are the aggressors and manipulators’—in contrast to ‘the majority of Victorian heroines’. B. A. Brashear in an unpublished thesis, ‘Wilkie Collins: from novel to play’, Case Western Reserve University (1972), considers the two dramatic versions, Armadale, a Drama, and Miss Gwilt, and the changes made to the character of Lydia Gwilt. Three recent additions to the literature on Collins include Lyn Pykett’s The Sensation Novel: From ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone’ (1994); a chapter in Can Jane Eyre be Happy? by John Sutherland (1997) entitled ‘What, precisely, does Miss Gwilt’s purple flask contain?;’ and Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic by Tamar Heller (1992).