THE WOMAN IN WHITE

 Wilkie COLLINS (1824-1889), elder son of the landscape painter William Collins. He was educated at private schools in London, but gained his real education on a two-year tour of Italy with his family (1836-38). He worked briefly for a tea importer and was later called to the bar, but never practised. His first book, a biography of his father, was published in 1848, and he later wrote numerous articles and short stories for Dickens´s periodicals “Household Words” and “All the Year Round” and for other journals, a book about a walking tour in Cornwall, and many moderately successful plays; but his reputation rests on his novels. His first was “Antonina” (1850), a historical novel about the fall of Rome; but with “Basil” (1852) he found his true metier as an expert in mystery, suspense, and crime. His finest work, the Novel of Sensation, was written in the 1860s, when he produced “The Woman in White” (1860), “No Name” (1862), “Armadale” (1866), and “The Moonstone” (1868). Collins wrote the first full-length detective stories in English, and set a mould for the genre which has lasted for a century. He excelled at constructing ingenious and meticulous plots, and made interesting experiments in narrative technique.