The English writer William Collins is rightfully considered the founder of the so-called “sensational novel,” which later split into adventure and detective genres. Collins is an acknowledged master of intrigue and captivating plot. It should be...

Sensation fiction emerged as a large bracket of literary genres that dominated the English market between the 1860s and the 1880s; two decades during which the sensation novel -which dealt with crime, horror, mystery, and forbidden love- came to...

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White portrays the distinctly partitioned sexual spheres in the Victorian era, as is reflected through the weak and victimized female characters and the powerful and domineering male characters. The Victorian...

The Woman in White, with its many twists and cliffhangers, reflects the turmoil of Victorian England, which was becoming a multicultural society. London’s hosting of the 1851 World Fair, a lavish affair hosted in a massive “Crystal Palace”,...

In Tamar Heller’s study, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, she suggests that Ellen Moers’ use of the term “Female Gothic” refers to the nightmarish marriages that are presented in novels of this genre, in which women were often...

In Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, the reader is presented with a mystery to be solved and is given access to the same information as the novel's various investigators. The reader is thus placed in the position of an active participant in the...

In 1987, Michael McKeon theorized that the novel form developed concomitant with the rise of the individual in English society. This correlation implies that the novel marked a shift from a communal experience of literature to a solitary...

One of the main themes developed in the passage from the novella “The Moonstone,” by Wilkie Collins, is the indelibility of memories and by consequence, of the past. The past comes back to haunt the present constantly throughout the passage,...

The Victorian depiction of the masculine is divided by not only class factors but also by degrees of gender conformity and morality, it is this conformity and morality that shapes the role of the masculine narrative in Victorian literature. In...

In Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, which is regarded as the first true English detective novel, the story of a priceless Indian diamond is told through a series of changing narrators. The diamond is stolen three times throughout its’ recorded...

Annoying, hypocritical, obsessive, sanctimonious; these are just some of the many ways to describe Drusilla Clack in The Moonstone. An irritating distant relative of the Verinders with a holier-than-thou attitude, she provides her own narrative...