91桃色

In this major biography, Catherine Peters explores the complicated life of Wilkie Collins, the greatest of the Victorian 鈥淪ensation鈥� novelists and author of the famous Woman in White and The Moonstone. An intimate of Dickens and of the Pre-Raphaelites Holman Hunt and Millais, Collins was called the 鈥渒ing of inventors鈥� by his publisher. On the surface, he was charming, unpretentious, and extremely good company, beloved by men and women. Beneath this fa莽ade, however, he was a complex and haunted man, addicted to laudanum, and his powerful, often violent novels revealed a dark side of Victorian life. He supported two common-law wives and their children, and as Peters shows, he provoked scandal by refusing to cloak his complicated love affairs in the customary hypocritical pretense of the period.

Having discovered a hitherto unknown autobiography by Wilkie Collins’s mother, Peters draws on this document and on thousands of Collins’s unpublished letters to create this provocative picture of his life and times. She describes in detail the saga of his exhausting struggle for better copyright protection for authors, especially for English authors in the United States. She has also studied the manuscripts of his novels, plays, and stories, including those which he did not complete, finding that some of his neglected novels turn out to be much more interesting than most readers realize today. This edition of the book has been supplemented to include an appendix describing Collins’s 鈥淭ahitian鈥� novel. Written when he was twenty, the manuscript of this work, 滨辞濒谩苍颈, was thought to have disappeared, but it has recently been rediscovered and sold to a private collector. For any Collins enthusiast, or for anyone interested in the literary history of the Victorian period, The King of Inventors provides a vivid account of Collins’s unusual personal life in the context of his literary and artistic friendships and of newly revealed facts about the two women with whom he shared his 鈥渄ouble life.鈥�

Originally published in 1993.

The 91桃色 Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of 91桃色. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the 91桃色 Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by 91桃色 since its founding in 1905.

Awards and Recognition

• One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994