Insanity and the Doppelgänger in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret

2015 ◽  
pp. 135-144
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

Man and Wife

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Country House ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Status Of Women

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

Aurora Floyd

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
First Marriage ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

abstract ‘With Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling triumvirate of ‘sensation novelists’. Aurora Floyd (1862–3), following hot on its heels, achieved almost equal popularity and notoriety. Like Lady Audley, Aurora is a beautiful young woman bigamously married and threatened with exposure by a blackmailer. But in Aurora Floyd, and in many of the novels written in imitation of it, bigamy is little more than a euphemism, a device to enable the heroine, and vicariously the reader, to enjoy the forbidden sweets of adultery without adulterous intentions. Passionate, sometimes violent, Aurora does succeed in enjoying them, her desires scarcely chastened by her disastrous first marriage. She represents a challenge to the mid-Victorian sexual code, and particularly to the feminine ideal of simpering, angelic young ladyhood. P. D. Edward’s introduction evaluates the novel’s leading place among ‘bigamy-novels’ and Braddon’s treatment of the power struggle between the sexes, as well as considering the similarities between the author and her heroine.

Wilkie Collins and the Woman in White

PMLA ◽  
1939 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clyde K. Hyder
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Woman In White

Inscribed on a tombstone in Kensal Green Cemetery are the following words: “In memory of Wilkie Collins, author of ‘The Woman in White’ and other works of fiction.” This inscription, written (as his will shows) by Collins himself, pays tribute to the book which probably stands highest among his works in the esteem of his readers.

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

2021 ◽  
pp. 316-319
Author(s):  
Joanne Shattock ◽  
Joanne Wilkes ◽  
Katherine Newey ◽  
Valerie Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Woman In White

ON THE TRACK OF THINGS: SENSATION AND MODERNITY IN MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON'S LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Badowska
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Moment

Nineteenth-century reviewers, though they disagreed about nearly all aspects of the sensation phenomenon, were united in diagnosing the sensation novel as a symptom of modernity. In a review of novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, Henry James noted that their books were typically set in “Modern England – the England of to-day's newspaper” and featured protagonists who were “English [gentlewomen] of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph” (593). Like Bram Stoker's Dracula some four decades later, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) represented “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (Stoker 67; ch. 3). But Braddon's novel was also “a sign of the times” because it betokened the rising awareness of modernity's tendency toward rapid obsoleteness (“Our Female Sensation Novelists” 485). The critical hostility directed against it at the moment of its greatest success in the 1860s also had the effect of exposing the seeds of transience that constitute the paradoxical essence of novelty.

London cabs, Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Middlebrook
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Transport ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
City Space ◽  
Woman In White

For all its industrial and technological heat, Victorian Britain remained a largely horse-drawn society. Focusing on the use of horse-drawn vehicles in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel The Woman in White, this essay explores representations of city space, intra-urban mobility, connectivity and public transport in popular nineteenth-century fiction. Cabs, I argue, represent intriguing and paradoxical spaces, poised between public and private, continually on the move in the static city. I ask how literary figurations of horse cabs focus and negotiate anxieties associated with travel within Victorian cities. I also suggest that cabs – vehicles for the fast and disreputable – articulate new ways of occupying space.

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