ollins' depiction of his era is forcefully
gripping. The novelists Balzac, Scott, and Cooper were
the favourites of his youth, and his works share with
theirs the breaking of new ground in fiction: Collins,
reacting to Dickens and Thackeray, desired to be a trail-blazer. In The Moonstone, for example,
Collins precariously shifts narrative points-of-view,
anticipating such twentieth-century novelists as Conrad
and Joyce. His keen eye for detail, his humanity, and his
sympathy for women are reflected in his letters, but
these change abruptly in form after the publication of
The Woman in White (1860), which marks
his perfection of the epistolary technique. He measures
up to Scott in structure, and to Balzac in innovation.
Collins changed the train schedule in The Woman in White after a Times reviewer pointed out an error in a serial episode: verisimilitude mattered very much to Collins. In his scrupulous attention to such realistic details he again anticipates later novelists. Eliot and others have credited him with being the father of the modern mystery novel, even though he may not have been aware that he was creating a genre — after all, The Moonstone is subtitled "A Romance." However, he consciously developed the mystery subgenre in new ways as he explored new realms.
Related Materials
Collins, Wilkie. Sensation Stories: Tales of Mystery and Suspense. London: Peter Owen, 2004.
Last modified 25 November 2004