The Classics Circuit » Wilkie Collins

This is our final week of Wilkie Collins, he had a great run on a fabulous group of blogs, but not to worry Elizabeth Gaskell is still going strong for the next few weeks. Please join these classic authors as they visit the next line-up of blogs!

Wilkie Collins blog stops for Monday, December 7 through Friday, December 11th:

December 8, 2008 - It’s All About Books Review: Hide and Seek

December 9, 2009 - Books of Mee Review: The Woman in White

December 10, 2009 - Linus’s Blanket General: An Overview of Wilkie Collins

Elizabeth Gaskell blog stops for Monday, December 7th through Friday, December 11th:

December 7, 2009 – Books and Chocolate Review: short stories My Lady Ludlow and Dr. Harrison

December 8, 2009 – Melanie’s Musings Review: Wives and Daughters

December 9, 2009 – The Bluestocking Society Review: North and South

December 10, 2009 – So Many Books Review: Lois the Witch

December 11, 2009 – Eclectic/Eccentric Review: Cranford

Week Five of Wilkie Collins Tour and Week Three of Elizabeth Gaskell Tour

christine (booktumbling) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:24:19 +0000

There is no rest for Mr. Collins and Ms. Gaskell. It is nearly December and the blog tours are still going strong. Please join these classic authors as they visit the next line-up of blogs!

Wilkie Collins blog stops for Monday, November 30th through Friday, December 4th:

November 30, 2009 - Michelle’s Masterful Musings Review: The Moonstone

December 1, 2009 - book-a-rama Review: Basil

December 2, 2009 - Pages Turned Review: The Dead Secret

December 3, 2009 - Books and Chocolate Review: Evil Genius or A House to Let

December 4, 2009 - Becky’s Book Reviews Review: Man and Wife

Elizabeth Gaskell blog stops for Monday, November 30th through Friday, December 4th:

November 30, 2009 – Reviews by Lola Review: Sylvia’s Lovers

December 1, 2009 – Moored at Sea Review: Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell

December 2, 2009 – Joyfully Retired Review: Cranford

December 3, 2009 – Linus’s Blanket Review: Gaskell biography

December 4, 2009 – Laura’s Reviews Review: Short Stories, Christmas Storms and Sunshine

Week Four of Wilkie Collins Tour and Week Two of Elizabeth Gaskell Tour

christine (booktumbling) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:46:08 +0000

These classic authors continue their blog stops this week. As you celebrate all those people and things for which you are thankful, take some time for yourself and join Mr. Collins and Ms. Gaskell on their tour stops. Mr. Collins is taking a break on Thursday. Happy Thanksgiving for those who will be enjoying family, friends and turkey!!

Wilkie Collins blog stops for Monday, November 23rd through Friday, November 27th:

November 23, 2009 - Fizzy Thoughts Review: The Woman in White

November 24, 2009 - Daily Words and Acts Review: No Name

November 25, 2009 - Bibliolatry Review: Armadale

November 27, 2009 - Reviews by Lola’s Blog Review: The Woman in White

Elizabeth Gaskell blog stops for Monday, November 23rd through Friday, November 27th:

November 23, 2009 – Lost Between the Letters Review: Wives and Daughters

November 24, 2009 – things mean a lot Review: Tales of Mystery and the Macabre

November 25, 2009 – Book-O-Rama Review: The Life of Charlotte Bronte

November 26, 2009 – Kay’s Bookshelf Review: Mary Barton (or another choice)

November 27, 2009 – One Librarian’s Book Reviews Review: North and South

Week Three of Wilkie Collins Tour and Week One of Elizabeth Gaskell Tour

christine (booktumbling) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:01:46 +0000

How exciting it is to have both Mr. Collins and Ms. Gaskell make blog stops this week! What a great way to learn about these great classic authors if you have always been curious. And if you are already a fan, perhaps there may be a review or information that will be new or at least remind you why you already enjoy these authors works.

Wilkie Collins blog stops for Monday, November 16 through Friday, November 20th:

November 16, 2009 - Fleur Fisher Reads Review: The Frozen Deep

November 17, 2009 - eclectic / eccentric Review: Moonstone

November 18, 2009 - Life is a Patchwork Quilt Review: Poor Miss Finch & Hide and Seek

November 19, 2009 – Rebecca Reads Review: A Biography

November 20, 2009 – Just Add Books Review: The Woman in White

Elizabeth Gaskell blog stops for Monday, November 16th through Friday, November 20th:

November 16, 2009 – Ooh…Books Review: Cranford

November 17, 2009 – Reading, Writing, Working, Playing General: about Gaskell

November 18, 2009 – Semicolon Review: North and South

November 19, 2009 – My Friend Amy Review: Short story or stories

November 20, 2009 – Becky’s Book Reviews Review: Mary Barton (or another choice)

Week Two of the Wilkie Collins Tour

christine (booktumbling) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:39:52 +0000

Can you believe it?!?! It is already the second week of November. Mr. Collins will be continuing his blog stops. Please join Mr. Collins while he visits the following blogs:

November 9, 2009 - Time Enough At Last Review: A Rogue’s Life

November 10, 2009 - The Zen Leaf Review: The Haunted Hotel

November 11, 2009 - Book Gazing Review: Woman in White

November 12, 2009 - Ooh…Books Review: The Moonstone

November 13, 2009 - Shelf Love Review: Armadale

Week One of the Wilkie Collins Tour!

christine (booktumbling) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:14:17 +0000

It is amazing that November is already upon us. The Wilkie Collins tour starts tomorrow (Monday). Please join Mr. Collins as he visits the following blogs this week. What a wonderful way to start the month of November!

November 2, 2009 - Sophisticated Dorkiness General: Wilkie Collins & Serial Novels Today

November 3, 2009 - A Striped Armchair Review: The Law and the Lady

November 4, 2009 - Kay’s Bookshelf Review: The Moonstone

November 5, 2009 - Moored at Sea Review: No Name

November 6, 2009 - In the Spring It Is the Dawn Review: The Frozen Deep

On Tour With Wilkie Collins (Dates!)

Nicole Bonia — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:00:55 +0000

From Monday, November 2nd to Friday, December 11, Wilkie Collins will be going on a virtual tour of the blogosphere. Check out these participating blogs where you’ll find reviews of his novels and biographies, as well as general information posts about this classic author:

November Tour Stops

November 2, 2009 - Sophisticated Dorkiness General: Wilkie Collins & Serial Novels Today

November 3, 2009 - A Striped Armchair Review: The Law and the Lady

November 4, 2009 - Kay’s Bookshelf Review: The Moonstone

November 5, 2009 - Moored at Sea Review: No Name

November 6, 2009 - In the Spring It Is the Dawn Review: The Frozen Deep

November 9, 2009 - Time Enough At Last Review: A Rogue’s Life

November 10, 2009 - The Zen Leaf Review: The Haunted Hotel

November 11, 2009 - Book Gazing Review: Woman in White

November 12, 2009 - Ooh…Books Review: The Moonstone

November 13, 2009 - Shelf Love Review: Armadale

November 16, 2009 - Fleur Fisher Reads Review: The Frozen Deep

November 17, 2009 - eclectic / eccentric Review: Moonstone

November 18, 2009 - Life is a Patchwork Quilt Review: Poor Miss Finch & Hide and Seek

November 19, 2009 – Rebecca Reads Review: A Biography

November 20, 2009 – Just Add Books Review: The Woman in White

November 23, 2009 - Fizzy Thoughts Review: The Woman in White

November 24, 2009 - Daily Words and Acts Review: No Name

November 25, 2009 - Bibliolatry Review: Armadale

November 27, 2009 - Reviews by Lola’s Blog Review: The Woman in White

November 30, 2009 - Michelle’s Masterful Musings Review: The Moonstone

December Tour Stops

December 1, 2009 - book-a-rama Review: Basil or The Evil Genius

December 2, 2009 - Pages Turned Review: No Name

December 3, 2009 - Books and Chocolate Review: Evil Genius or A House to Let

December 4, 2009 - Becky’s Book Reviews Review: Man and Wife

December 7, 2009 - Linus’s Blanket General: An Overview of Wilkie Collins

December 8, 2008 - It’s All About Books Review: Hide and Seek

December 9, 2009 - Books of Mee Review: The Woman in White

Hope you can join us on the tour!

Wilkie Collins Tour: Dates Assigned

Rebecca Reid — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:46:32 +0000

If you signed up for the Wilkie Collins Classic Circuit, we’ve sent you an email with your assigned dates. It has come from me (Rebecca Reads) or from Bella (A Bibliophile’s Bookshelf). If you haven’t received it, check your spam folder. If you still haven’t received it, send me a note at rebecca [at] rebeccareid [dot] com. Once we know that the schedule will work for the participants, we’ll post it up here so everyone can follow the tour come November.

The Wilkie Collins tour has a total of 29 stops, beginning November 2 and going until December 11! While there is some overlap on books that will be reivewed, overall, it looks like a great, varied tour. I’m really excited for it.

Tomorrow evening, I’ll post the sign up for the overlapping Elizabeth Gaskell tour. I think that one will be great as well!

Announcing Nov 09: Wilkie Collins To Visit the Circuit

Rebecca Reid — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:08:26 +0000

The votes have been tallied!

Out of 88 votes, 34% voted for Collins, 31% voted for Gaskell, and 17% each voted for Eliot and Trollope. Further, 67% of voters indicated that they’d participate in a tour for the author they’d voted for. Thanks so much for exceeding our expectations! This should be fun.

The first author to tour The Classics Circuit will be Wilkie Collins. The tour will run from 2 November until approximately 4 December. Sign up for the tour using the form at the bottom of this post.

However, Elizabeth Gaskell was a very close second. Because of the overwhelming interest in both authors, we’ve decided to do a second (overlapping) tour of Elizabeth Gaskell from 16 November to the middle of December. Return next week to sign up for the Elizabeth Gaskell tour.

About Wilkie Collins and His Writing

Wilkie Collins was born in London on January 8, 1824 and quickly became a prolific writer. In his life, he wrote over 20 novels, 6 collections of short fiction plus numerous short works never published, 15 plays, and over 100 scholarly articles. Some of his best known works are The Moonstone, The Woman in White, Armadale, Hide and Seek, and No Name.

Collins ushered in two forms of writing – the sensation novel and the detective novel – earning him the title “King of Inventors.” The Woman in White caused a public mania for sensation novels. Including scandalous events like theft, drug use, extreme emotionalism, seduction, and insanity, sensation novels sparked controversy in the staid Victorian era. H.L. Mansel claimed sensation novels were concerned purely with excitement in order “to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite.” Mansel also mistakenly claimed that “no more immortality is dreamed of for it than for the fashions of the current season,” but the sensation novel withstood the test of time.

Along with sensation novels, Collins was the forerunner of detective novels. While Charles Dickens had already written Bleak House, which contains many of the elements of detective fiction, it was Collins who formalized and developed those conventions in his writing of The Moonstone. Because of Collins, readers of detective novels have the bumbling policemen, the eccentric hyper-intelligent detective, the amateur sleuth and the sidekick, the isolated country house, a party where a crime is committed, a beautiful and perverse heroine, red herrings, and the twist at the end. While these inclusions may seem obvious to contemporary readers, they were new to the first reader’s of The Moonstone.

Wilkie Collins died September 23, 1889.

The Novels

The Woman in White (about 525 pages) is an epistolary novel, using documents written by various people to tell the story of Walter Hartright. Hired to teach two young girls, Hartright travels to Limmeridge. But on the way he meets a mysterious woman in white whom he helps. Of course, what he doesn’t know is that she just escaped from an Asylum. And so the mystery begins. Read The Woman in White online at eBooks at Adelaide and Project Gutenberg.

Book blogger’s thoughts:

Mysteries in Paradise says this book “has to be on every serious crime fiction reader’s syllabus.”
Nymeth at things mean alot asks readers: “who doesn’t love a tale of madness, crime, forgery, secret societies, mistakes, conspiracies, and gloomy mansions?”
Matthew at A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook says: “How Collins takes seemingly disjointed pieces of the puzzle, plots that don’t at first glance add up, and orchestrates them into a story so coherent and yet convoluted is beyond my comprehension.”

In The Moonstone (about 525 pages), a religiously important and monetarily valuable Indian diamond is stolen by an English officer during the battle of Seringapatam. The officer bequeaths it to his niece, Rachel, as retribution for the family shunning him, for he knows the Brahmins will do anything to retrieve the diamond and that the diamond has a curse upon it. The very first night the diamond is in Rachel’s possession, it is stolen. Much like The Woman in White, The Moonstone is an epistolary novel with many different people narrating the events surrounding the theft of the diamond. Read The Moonstone online at Project Gutenberg.

Book blogger’s thoughts:

The Sleepy Reader believes “the story really gets fun when the author starts rolling out the characters.”
Jenclair at A Garden Carried in the Pocket says, “it experiments with multiple narrators of varying degrees of reliability and pertinent information, speaks to British colonialism and racial assumptions, raises questions of class, treats religious fanaticism satirically and humorously, and shows a contempt for the hypocrisy of certain philanthropic organizations.”
The Indextrious Reader admits to “a fondness for Gabriel Betteredge, an aged family retainer with a predilection for his pipe and for Robinson Crusoe.”

Hide and Seek (about 480 pages) was the third novel by Collins and he dedicated it to his good friend Charles Dickens “as a token of admiration and affection.” In the novel, an artist and his wife adopt a deaf girl who had been living with a traveling circus. Her only connection to her mysterious past is a bracelet with the initials MG. Read Hide and Seek at Google books, Project Gutenberg, and The Literature Network.

Armadale (about 880 pages) is filled with misplaced identities, poisonings, family secrets, deception, and the supernatural. Allan Armadale gives a deathbed confession of murder and leaves the confession as a legacy to his son. Armadale has a complex and intriguing plot line. Read it at Project Gutenberg. The Indextrious Reader calls Armadale “the most enjoyable Collins I’ve read so far.”

In No Name (about 780 pages), when Magdalen’s parent die, she and her sister, illegitimate daughters, fall from grace. Once in love and hopeful, Magdalen must now struggle to reclaim her identity. To do, so Magdalen becomes many people, taking on various roles to suit her purposes. Read No Name at Project Gutenberg. Tales from the Reading Room says, “this story is an absolute masterclass in how to create narrative tension.”

Antonina (about 490 pages), Collins’ first published novel, features a female lead pursued by her father, a purveyor of the new Christian religions, his steward, a pagan, a Goth chieftain with a vengeful sister, and a lustful neighbor. If you are not already intrigued, the subtitle for this book is “The Fall of Rome.”

In Poor Miss Finch (about 480 pages), Collins revisits physical handicaps as in Hide and Seek, but this time our lead character is 21-year-old Lucillia, who has been blind since she was one. One day she begins to see, but regaining sight is more complex than one might think.

Fallen women have been the inspiration for many a work, and in The New Magdalen (about 290 pages), Collins visits this theme. The protagonist, Mercy, was tricked into a life on the streets. She tries to rehabilitate herself, to redeem herself in the eyes of her moralistic society, but it isn’t until she is able to adopt an entirely new identity that she makes any headway.

Other popular works include the following (links go to an information page on the Wilkie Collins info page):

Two Destinies (about 240 pages): Romance and ghosts collide. Read it online at Google Books.
A Rogue’s Life (about 150 pages): A young man doesn’t live up to his father’s expectations.
The Law and the Lady (about 490 pages): A female sleuth leads in this early detective story.
The Evil Genius (about 360 pages): The evil genius is the interfering mother-in-law in this story, which deals with themes of divorce and child-custody.
The Dead Secret (about 270 pages): A heavy responsibility weighs on a timid woman.
Iolani, or Tahiti As it Was (about 250 pages): Collins wrote this novel when he was 19 and it wasn’t published until the 1990s.
Basil (about 350 pages): In his introduction, Collins writes that he has “not hesitated to violate the conventionalities of sentimental fiction.”

Short Stories and Novellas by Collins

Little Novels (about 360 pages) is a collection of 14 short stories by Collins. The stories do not have a central thread, but many of the stories deal with love, particularly love and marriage which defy traditional expectations of social class. And as always, the stories have elements of sensational fiction such as the supernatural, mistaken or hidden identities, poisoning, and so on.

After Dark (about 330 pages) is a collection of six short stories by Collins.

The Dead Alive (about 72 pages) is a legal thriller based on a true story. Read The Dead Alive online at The Literature Network and Google Books.

Who Killed Zebedee? is a short story where a young policeman finds himself unprepared for a murder investigation set in a mysterious lodging house.

Other short stories include Volpurno and A Little Fable.

This is not a complete list of Collins’ work. For lists and summaries of Collins’ other works, visit the Wilkie Collins information page.

The number of works Wilkie Collins wrote, the future novels he inspired, and the stylistic conventions he created have earned him a place in the literary canon. These and other works by Collins can be read online at Project Gutenberg.

Information compiled from the following sources by Trisha:

Wikipedia
Victorian Web
Introductions in The Moonstone, The Woman in White, and Hide and Seek.

To Participate

For this tour, you could read and review any of Wilkie Collins’ novels (he wrote 27) or you could read and review some of his short stories. Or, if you’ve read a lot of Collins already, you could write a general post about the author and his style. Finally, if you’d like to read about the author himself, you could read and review a biography of Wilkie Collins and/or write up a creative “Author Interview” post. Although we know certain works will be most popular (and that is fine), we are hoping for some variety among the various tour stops.

After sign up closes, we will email you an “assigned” day that Wilkie Collins will visit your blog. Of course, if that day doesn’t work for you, we can find something that does, and if something does come up, you can always let us know and we can take you off the schedule. That said, we are hoping for a list of participants who are able to commit to posting about Wilkie Collins.

If you decide to sign up, we’d like you to be pretty sure you’ll be able to participate.

Read the information about Collins above, see what works your library has available, and think about how you might want to host Wilkie Collins on your blog.

Once you’ve decided, come back here and sign up to join the tour. Tour sign up closes Saturday, 3 October, 8:00 a.m. CST.

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