Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was an English novelist, the son of a landscape painter, who trained as a lawyer but never practiced. A close friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, he published his best-known novels in Dickens's magazines: The Woman in White in 1860 and The Moonstone in 1868, which T. S. Eliot called the first and best of English detective novels. Collins was the leading writer of sensation fiction, intricately plotted novels of secrets, false identities and crime in respectable households, and later books such as No Name attack the legal position of women. He never married, maintained two households, and took laudanum for gout for much of his life.