Structure and Substance in Wilkie Collins

Nineteenth-century English author Wilkie Collins is a second-tier novelist, but his stories are full of narrative invention, high-flown emotions, and deep insights into the fate of women in English society. Moreover, Collins offered an experimental style that became overshadowed only because the Modernists were so radically experimental in their own fashion. Collins mixed genres and so offers his readers breathtaking shifts between highly accomplished passages of opera, romantic comedy, melodrama, and theatre. Collins also offers characters that have obscure and conflicted motivations, something not done much before he wrote.

In "Structure and Substance of Wilkie Collins," Martin Wenglinsky provides an in-depth analysis of five Collins novels by showing how Collins deploys his era's standard forms of literature. Collins provides modern readers with a fresh vision of Victorian England from a secular and liberal point of view quite different from the more religious-tinged humanitarianism of Dickens and Eliot.