Indexes to Fiction: Reviews and Comments

Reviews and Comments on Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life
'Graham Law and Andrew Maunder have pooled their considerable knowledge about - and enthusiasm for - Wilkie Collins, the sensation novel, and nineteenth-century print culture to produce a very useful addition to the Palgrave Macmillan Literary Lives series. Combining original scholarship on Collins's negotiation of the Victorian literary marketplace with lively readings of his fiction that also give a clear sense of recent trends both in Collins criticism and work on nineteenth-century popular fiction, the book serves equally well as an introduction to or an update on Collins and his literary and cultural contexts.' Lyn Pykett, Aberystwyth University Review in Biography (September 2010)
'Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life is a thoroughly engaging study that has much to offer both literary scholars and students alike. While each chapter includes relevant biographical facts, Law and Maunder take great care in thoughtfully delineating the professional, publishing, and social contexts that shaped Collins's literary career. The selected contexts through which they have chosen to trace the contours of Collins's robust literary life are capacious: his education and reading habits; his social circles, including his close association with Charles Dickens; his relationships with women in his personal life and in his fiction; the influences of London on his life and writing; his prolific career as a journalist; his lifelong obsession with the drama; his ongoing commitment to social concerns; his personal and professional experiences on the international scene; and his evolving relationship with the Victorian literary marketplace. The comparative perspective that Law and Maunder bring to many of these chapters is perhaps what makes this study of Collins particularly unique. ... Perhaps the most valuable contribution that Law and Maunder make to Collins studies are the chapters in which they bring to light Collins's achievements as a journalist and a dramatist. In "Collins as Journalist" they offer a compendious overview of Collins's extensive contributions, both journalistic and fictional, to various periodicals over the course of his career. Law and Maunder also demonstrate the ways in which Collins's early journalistic endeavors provided a kind of testing ground for the "innovative mix of story-telling techniques" (p. 59) that he would later employ so successfully in his novels. Further, they argue convincingly that Collins's social concerns - his "sense of the social mission of the writer" (p. 59) - were clearly percolating much earlier and more methodically in his writing than previously suggested.' Maria K. Bachman, Coastal Carolina University Review in Nineteenth-Century Literature 64:3 (December 2009)
'As part of Palgrave's biographical Literary Lives series, Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life offers an account of the personal, literary, and cultural influences which shaped the writing, and writing life, of Wilkie Collins. Coauthors Graham Law and Andrew Maunder make frequent use of well-respected biographical and bibliographical works on Collins in order to form their own reading of his literary life. These include William Baker's Wilkie Collins's Library: A Reconstruction, Catherine Peters's biography, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, and the most recent collection of Collins's letters, The Public Face of Wilkie Collins, which Law co-edited with Baker, Andrew Gasson, and Paul Lewis. (Law is also editor of the Wilkie Collins Society Journal, which is often the first publisher of newly discovered Collins information and material.) This makes for an up-to-date and well-informed interpretation of Collins's literary practices, and also of the changing publishing world of which he was a part for many decades.' Helena Ifill, University of Sheffield Review in Victorian Periodicals Review 42:4 (December 2009):418-20
'The book assembles some fascinating information about Collins's literary affairs that existing biographies have insufficiently covered: discoveries about his journalism, discussions of his chosen publication formats and interactions with publishers, and refreshing information about his plays, which have been critically neglected ... the authors are particularly knowledgeable about publishing practices, and their book is a handy if partial contribution to Collins studies.' Dianne F. Sadoff & John Kucich, 'Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century' In Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 49:4 (Autumn 2009): 1009-47
'Wilkie's life cut another way - analysing his education and his circles, looking at him as a journalist and missionary, and relating him to London, women, the theatre, overseas, and the Victorian literary marketplace.' Paul Lewis, Wilkie Collins Society 'Books about Wilkie Collins', <http://www.web40571.clarahost.co.uk/wilkie/biogs.htm>
'This addition to Palgrave Macmillan's Literary Lives series contributes to the growing scholarly reappraisal of Wilkie Collins's work. It draws on the newly available correspondence published in The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), of which Law is an editor. A large proportion of these letters are concerned with the business side of writing, and here correspondence is mined for fresh insights into Collins's career networks. ... In its careful reassessment of the paradoxes of Collins's life, both private and professional, Law and Maunder's book not only makes essential reading for Collins scholars but adds much that is original to our understanding of the Victorian literary world.' Anne Witchard, University of Westminster Review in Journal of Victorian Culture 16:1 (April 2011) 158-162