An enigmatic countess with a wicked past, a terrible crime, a shadowy Venetian palazzo and a grisly apparition demanding vengeance - all the ingredients for a vintage Gothic horror tale.
Wilkie Collins was born in London on 8 January 1824. His father was the landscape painter William Collins. After school he worked for a tea merchant before studying to become a lawyer. In 1848 he published a biography of his father and his first novel, Antonina, followed in 1850. In 1851 he met Charles Dickens who would later edit and publish some of his novels. Collins's novels were extremely popular in his own time as well as now. The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868) are his best known works. Collins was linked with two women (one of whom bore him three children) but he never married. He died on 23 September 1889.
Alchemy, premonitions, disappearances, madness, supernatural
sightings and even a whiff of incest combine...a pleasingly nasty
affair
*The Times*
An atmospheric and ghostly evocation of a wintry Venice in the
1800s
*Guardian*
Wilkie Collins is the finest practitioner of the novel of
sensation... he took the elements gothic fiction relied upon -
secret lives, lovers, villainy - and moved them into the suburbs...
here the genre fused with the already established crime novel and
took it in a new direction, more familiar and more frightening
*Daily Telegraph*
Wilkie Collins [drew] on the conventions of blood and thunder
melodrama but subtly let the reader know he's having fun with the
game
*Guardian*
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