Wilkie Collins was talked up by his publisher as the ‘king of inventors’, and hailed as a technically brilliant literary craftsman. Mentored by Charles Dickens, who became a lifelong friend and supporter, Collins was one of the bestselling writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Yet, the immense popularity of the ‘sensation novel’ form he made his own seemed to disbar it from serious critical attention. One typical contemporary review of Collins’ breakthrough thriller The Woman in White (1859–60) dismissed him as:
The sensation genre rehashed Gothic, melodramatic, criminal and realistic elements for mid-nineteenth-century readers to reveal the criminal conspiracies and sexual scandals happening in respectable suburban villas rather than in ruined Italian castles. In establishing ‘the secret theatre of home’ as his setting and thus ‘domesticating’ the Gothic, Collins wrote subversively about Victorian marriage, believing its totemic cultural significance encouraged the ‘othering’ of perceived outsiders such as adulterers, bigamists, sex workers, unmarried mothers and illegitimate children. He saw the institution as propping up patriarchal systems of property and inheritance; in The Woman in White, Sir Percival Glyde marries Laura Fairlie to steal her fortune, not her heart.
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