Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

Description

The definitive biography of Wilkie Collins- the Victorian novelist, playwright, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, who lived a life of sensation. The definitive biography of Wilkie Collins- the Victorian novelist, playwright, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, who lived a life of sensation. Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, was the master of the Victorian sensation novel, but he also had a complex private life that could have come straight out of one of his bestselling novels. While his books focused on uncovering family secrets, Wilkie was determined to keep his own unconventional domestic arrangements - living with two women, neither of them his wife - hidden from the outside world. In this colourful investigative biography, set against the backdrop of Victorian London, Andrew Lycett brings to life one of England's greatest writers and reveals a brilliant, contrary and sensual man, deeply committed to his work.

Andrew Lycett has a degree in history from Oxford University. After several years as a foreign correspondent, he has been a biographer since the early 1990s. His books include highly praised lives of Ian Fleming, Dylan Thomas, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Geographical Society. He lives in North London.

Acclaimed biographer Andrew Lycett uncovers a few skeletons in Wilkie Collins's closet, revealing a private life every bit as sensational as anything the author dreamt up in his fiction. * Observer * Clean outlines, crystal clear English, and a clear-eyed picture of his subject... Andrew Lycett's a terrific narrator... the Hemingway of biographers... One sees Collins more clearly having read Lycett... A fine, and pre-eminently useful, biography of the most elusive character in Victorian literature. -- John Sutherland * The Spectator * Collins's private life... was as rich in secrets as his books. Sensible, thoughtful and never less than scrupulous, Lycett is just the right biographer to assess whether such potentially sensational material should affect our interpretation of Collins's work. * Sunday Times * As delicate as it is thorough, Lycett peels away the layers of deception with which Collins protected himself and shows us the engagingly vulnerable figure beneath * Evening Standard * Excellent on Collins's friendship with Dickens, which he presents, convincingly, as much more of a relationship of equals than Dickens's biographers allow * The Times *