The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins

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 ménage à 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. "A fascinating insight into the personality of an eminent Victorian and a scholarly footnote to the social history of the Victorian literary world."—Punch. "It is unlikely that there can now be a killer or more factual life of Collins than Clarke has given us."—London Review of Books.