His best work displays a depth of social and psychological insight that was extraordinary for his time or his genre.
- Salon de 1761 (French Edition).
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - Reading Guide - theranchhands.com: Books.
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- M18 - 14 ans, espionne (French Edition);
Ever a rebel against social pretension, Collins once skipped a formal dinner party to which he had been invited in order to put on casual clothes and stand with the laborers watching the festivities from the street. The same note of social defiance rings in The Moonstone when Rosanna, despite her class, her physical handicap, and her prison record dares to love and hope for love from the well-heeled hero of the story, Franklin Blake, in competition with the beautiful and wealthy Rachel Verinder.
The respectable middle-class home hides unspeakable secrets. Wealth is rooted in plunder or deceit.
The Woman in White
Gossip parades as piety, embezzlement as charity. People are not who they appear to be. Reality is built on shivering, shifting sand. In many ways Collins is a master magician, using his craft to keep our rapt attention on the unfolding drama while revealing, with a sleight-of-hand, the mysteries that lie just beneath the surface of our ordinary lives. Born in London in , William Wilkie Collins grew up in the company of artists and writers. Naming their son after his godfather, the popular artist Sir David Wilkie, the Collinses counted Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth among their acquaintances.
When he began attending private school at age 11, Wilkie was a good student but not a happy one. Small and clumsy, he was an easy victim for bullies.
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But he would later credit one of his boyhood tormentors with cultivating his narrative powers. As Wilkie later recalled: I was the unhappy boy appointed to amuse the captain from that time forth. If I rebelled, the captain. The brutality of his education was mercifully interrupted by a two-year family trip to Paris and Italy that was a great revelation for the boy. What he learned in Italy seemed more valuable to him than all of his schooling. His return after the trip to an English boarding school was so miserable that his family withdrew him at age Apprenticed by his father as a clerk for a tea company, Collins showed little interest in commerce, preferring to spend office hours writing poems and plays.
He was released from the apprenticeship and sent for legal training in London, but the law, too, was to serve primarily as grist for the literary mill rather than a means of earning a living. When his father died in , Collins kept a promise he had made to write his biography, which received good reviews and was even a modest financial success. Encouraged by the experience, he published a novel set in ancient Rome and a travel book before he met the man with whom he would achieve widespread literary success.
As a director Dickens was a notoriously tough taskmaster, but when rehearsal was over he had an equally inexhaustible taste for recreation. In Collins he found his equal for both work and play. Eventually the marriage would strain relations between the two men, for Dickens came to see Charles Collins as weak and the marriage as loveless. Caroline left him in that same year, probably because he had begun seeing Martha Rudd, a dark, strong-minded, working-class girl who would become the mother of his three children but never his wife.
Although Collins lived twenty more years and published nineteen more books, their increasingly moralistic tone showed only glimmers of his former mastery.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
Collins died in and divided his estate equally between Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd. How does her double, Anne Catherick, illuminate the dark side of that ideal? But Collins lived a life on the periphery of respectable English society that his father would not have condoned. In the novel, how is pedigree intertwined with deception and immorality?
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Where do the lines blur between servants and the served? How are the underprivileged used as a screen for viewing the upper-crust characters? Why did he have to leave England and return in order to make this change?
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins | Lulu's Bookshelf
One critic has suggested that Marian and Fosco might be considered the true protagonists of The Woman in White. In what sense might this be true? He helps her to escape from the men pursuing her and then tries his best to forget about it — despite the fact that she seems intimately familiar with the same family and country house he is about to take his position at, and that when he gets there he finds she bears and uncanny resemblance to his new pupil, Laura Fairlie.
Was he the one who sent his men to pursue her that night and why? Or is she really as she seems and just a poor escaped madwoman? Being female is not a defect! And a lot of it very melodramatic — women fall down in swoons at bad news, catch deadly fevers from wearing wet clothes while men plot elaborate murders, steal money from their wives, manipulate everybody around them, and go on random expeditions to Central America. In that way I found the first half of the book, which was all about the slow building of atmosphere and suspense, vastly superior to the second half where things seemed almost rushed into conclusions with a lot more importance placed on sheer coincidence and dumb luck than felt satisfactory — hence the 4.
Filed under Novels , Reviews. Tagged as 19th Century Literature , 4. This has been on my to be read pile for a while. I think it needs a quick push so it is closer to the top! Thanks for the review!
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