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

Hardcover. Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1st US, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly edgeworn dust jacket. 239 pages including index. Author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins is widely regarded as "the father of the detective story." How curious that his own life has puzzled investigators despite numerous attempts to unravel it. Collins lived a publicly Victorian existence as a contemporary of Dickens, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake in mid-19th-century England. Yet upon his death he left a will dividing his estate equally -- between two mistresses.