Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation review tales of the unexpected

Andrew Lycett's biography succeeds in vividly portraying this most contradictory of Victorian novelists

Andrew Lycett's lucid biography unpicks the contradictions at the heart of Wilkie Collins's character. Here was a man who understood the potency of hidden things, the power and danger of secrets; a man who expended much ink on the legal plight of the married woman in Victorian society, a pioneer in the field of "sensation fiction", whose best work, The Woman in White , written in 1859, and The Moonstone , in 1868, pretty much defined a popular literary genre.

Here also was a man who kept two mistresses throughout his life, an unconventional living arrangement by most standards and something he kept secret apart from all but a few close friends. The women, Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd (the latter bore him three children), were from comparatively humble backgrounds. Collins declined to marry either of them, though he managed to make the arrangement work, and both women fared far better than his friend Charles Dickens's ostracised wife whom Collins attempted to remain on good terms with; she was, after all, also his brother's mother-in-law.

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