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“... in an appendix. Where Forster praises Dickens’s ‘unbroken continuity of kindly impulse’, Wilkie Collins wrote in the margins of his copy: ‘Wretched English claptrap.’ Forster’s discretion ensured that he wouldn’t be the definitive biographer, even if no writer would ever know as much about Dickens as he did. Long out of print, his life ...”

“... by heart. It’s relatively easy to pastiche The Moonstone, say, because most people remember from Wilkie Collins not much more than genre and milieu and will smile at the way you remake those into Fingersmith; but with Shakespeare either you depart aggressively from what you know your readers know, or you dip back comfortably into the known, or you flit ...”

“... an Indian’s, with dirt’). And behind Orwell and McEwan may stand a Victorian manipulator like Wilkie Collins. There is the celebrated visual surprise, for instance, when Walter Hartright sees Marian Halcombe from behind, in The Woman in White. She seems to have a fine figure, a ‘comely shape’, until she turns: She left the window – and I said ...”

“... possibilities were being incorporated into literature – in works by Dickens, Shelley, Poe, Wilkie Collins, Balzac, Browning, Melville, Hawthorne. Its best-known appearance is in du Maurier’s Trilby, which came out in the 1890s, a darker and more sophisticated time than the 1840s. Svengali here is not a benign healer but a force for evil: He’s ...”

“... Quieting Syrup. As is clear from the famous opium-users of the day – Coleridge, De Quincey, Wilkie Collins, Wilberforce, Clive of India, et al – the analgesic use of opium swiftly shaded into psychological and physical dependence. On the other hand, no one can read the letters of Coleridge and De Quincey – let alone ‘Kubla Khan’ and ...”

“... Mrs Thackeray, no flagrantly unconventional union of the Lewes-Eliot kind. Trollope did not, like Wilkie Collins, steep himself in laudanum and keep two mistresses. He did not, like Bulwer Lytton, lock his wife in a lunatic asylum. He did not die tragically young like the Brontës or poor, like Charles Lever. He did not become Prime Minister of ...”

“... with available men; but at the same time Defoe uses her dangerous secret dress – in the way Wilkie Collins used his woman in white’s dress – as a troubling sign of irrational forces at work. During the 18th and 19th centuries, novelists began to use dress to evoke the inner life of characters, and to show the unconscious ways clothes affect ...”

“... book is an impeccably documented account of Twiss’s dull ascension; the second is a Wilkie Collins novel in miniature, recounting his disgrace after he was caught trying to manufacture a false identity for his wife. Pharaïlde van Lynseele was a Belgian prostitute Twiss had met during forays into London’s demi-monde. When he married her ...”

“... against the young man’s admission to the Garrick Club. He also frowned on Katey’s wedding to Wilkie Collins’s brother Charlie because, as Gottlieb puts it, ‘no one was worthy enough for his beloved daughter.’ The marriage was childless, and it seems sexless; there were suggestions that Charlie Collins was ...”

“... the back of a cupboard, hidden beneath her rain cape. This tiny jolt of drama, a moment almost of Wilkie Collins plotting, doesn’t seem extravagant as a long-service award offered – in lieu of a gold watch – to the reader just reaching the 550-page mark, and perhaps considering retirement. It’s another century, and another hundred pages, before ...”

“... of a conceit, feasible partly because ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once ...”

“... to break with orthodox form that Romanticism exists for. Coleridge wrote, in 1818, to William Collins: ‘Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings, from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum.’ The research asylum. It is surely curious that a biographical ...”