Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, The
by: Clarke, William M.

Chicago, Ivan Dee, 1st US, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 239 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins has been hailed as "the father of the detective story." His own life story has a similar mysterious ring to it. When Collins died in 1899 he shocked Victorians by dividing his estate equally between two mistresses. He also acknowledged the three children of one of the mistresses as his own. In The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, William Clarke has pieced together the truth behind this menage a trois, uncovering and exploring, with insight and sympathy, the private relationships of a fascinating writer who was a contemporary of Dickens, Constable, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, and Rossetti. "A literary coup ... casts a fresh beam of light on the great, dark seam of Victorian sexual mores."--The Observer.