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A gripping short biography of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, two early masterpieces of mystery and detection.
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely nearsighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colorful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was nonetheless a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women—and avidly read by generations of readers. Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, "the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists," from Collins' childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame, and his lifelong friendship with that other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. In addition to his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone—often called the first true detective novel—and the sensational The Woman in White, he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. Told with Ackroyd's inimitable verve, this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great storyteller, full of surprises, rich in humor and sympathetic understanding.Product details
Series: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Nan A. Talese (October 6, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385537395
ISBN-13: 978-0385537391
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1 x 7.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.1 star See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #955,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)#5796 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors
#20223 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Historical
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Ackroyd paints a portrait of a man of great charm, with friends among a host of Victorian artists, writers and musicians ... He’s clearly at home in Victorian England and has an obvious affection for his subject. The gift of his book is to take Collins out of Dickens’s shadow." —The New York Times Book Review
"Smart, stylish ... More than other biographers, Ackroyd brings out the contrast between Collins’s serenity — 'He was perhaps the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists' — and the poor health that dogged him for much of his life." —Washington Post
“The depiction of Collins as an artist afflicted with gout and neuralgia who worked himself to the brink of nervous prostration with each book he wrote makes him as interesting as one of his own fictional characters. Ackroyd’s appraisal of his subject—that ‘he breathed upon facts and kindled them into life’—is applicable to his own achievement here.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[Ackroyd] is unfailingly perceptive about Wilkie as a novelist, stressing not only the ‘genius for construction’ but also the lifelong support of the underdogs of Victorian society: women, the poor and even the Indians who figure in The Moonstone. Ackroyd also makes a very good case why we should explore some of the lesser works as well as the two masterpieces. That, surely, is what a literary biography should do above all: send you back to the work.” —The Independent
"A highly readable introduction to a marvellous and still underrated writer." —The Telegraph
"Mr Ackroyd is a consummate literary critic and he neatly weaves analysis of Collins's works into the chronology of his life ... compulsive reading." —The EconomistAbout the Author
PETER ACKROYD is the author of London: The Biography, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, Shakespeare: The Biography, and Thames: The Biography. He has written acclaimed biographies of T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Sir Thomas More as well as several successful novels. He has won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the South Bank Award for Literature. His last book was a biography of Charlie Chaplin.
Customer Reviews
3.0 star
Biography of the man and his work
BySassyPantson April 20, 2016|Verified Purchase
I was introduced to the novels of Wilkie Collins as a college freshman. The class was taught by Dr. Robert Ashley, whose book on Collins is listed in Mr. Ackroyd's bibliography. I enjoyed the Moonstone and The Woman in White in college, but have a much deeper appreciation now. I was so excited to find this biography.
My middle of the road rating is because I did not learn much new information about Mr. Collins and his life. Perhaps there is not much available since his contemporary was Charles Dickens. Speaking of Mr. Dickens, I have read in other sources that there was more of a rivalry between the two of them. If that is true, it was certainly downplayed here. This book is equal parts about the books, plays, short stories, and essays written by Mr. Collins. It certainly peaked my interest to read more of his work. I also enjoyed the insights into Mr. Collins' philosophy and writing style. The book is well written and moves along at a good pace. I was just wishing for more.
5.0 star
wonderful insights by brilliant biographer Peter Ackroyd
ByEve Howardon October 13, 2016|Verified Purchase
Fascinating subject, the eccentric and delightful author, wonderful insights by brilliant biographer Peter Ackroyd, and an unexpected glimpse into the working and social relationship between Collins and Dickens. They vacationed together - traveling in Europe with their families, they worked together on dramatic projects and were excellent friends. I loved the digressions on the mental and physical maladies of the Victorians and how they were dealt with. Highly recommend this to all Collins fans!
4.0 star
Delicious Hor D'oeurvre
ByRJ McGillon October 9, 2015|Vine Customer Review of Free Product
Much like a delicious hor d'oeuvre, A Brief Life is a tid bit that prepares the literary pallet and wets the appetite for more. Even those unfamiliar with this Victorian era author will find enough information in this little book to appreciate Collins' contribution to literature. It's a quick, easy read, filled with emotion, humor and strange facts.
Not to be unkind, but Collins is described as having a 'strange' physical appearance, plus having sworn off marriage, one would be surprised if a lady gave him the time of day...But not so, he was quite popular with the ladies and successfully maintained long term relations with not one, but two mistresses. He was the first author to pen an English mystery with a female detective in the lead role. Collins suffered from a variety of painful ailments, which lead to a serious addiction to opium. He had deep, heartfelt appreciation and respect for those serving in the military. With war raging, he became convinced that a local fortune teller could commune with the dead. While this brought him some degree of comfort, it also alienated him from a large section of the population. He tried his hand theater, without much fanfare. He is most famous for his novels, The Lady in White and Moonstone. Collins had an artists eye for detail, in his prose and descriptions - he painted stories with pen on paper, as his father before him had brush on canvas. While he enjoyed the adulation of fans during his lifetime, it is because his works have stood the test of time he is considered a master storyteller today. Just as Chaucer, Twain, Poe and Dickens are held in the highest of literary esteem - Wilkie Collins may be lesser known, but his works are no less masterful.
Peter Ackroyd set out to deliver a brief overview of Wilkie Collins - I'm sure that's why he titled the book "A Brief Life." This wasn't meant to be a 1900 page, detailed history, and it isn't. At under 300 pages, Ackroyd's book does an excellent job of introducing Wilkie Collins to strangers and reminding fans what they liked about his work. Peter Ackroyd talks about Wilkie Collins as though he were telling us about an old friend....sharing stories from his humble beginnings to his days of fame and of course his endearing friendship with Charles Dickens. Years ago when I read Ackroyd's, Charles Dickens biography*, I felt the two shared so much it was like they had some kind of spiritual or cosmic kinship. Now after reading A Brief Life, the dialogue flows so naturally it's as if Ackroyd has a genuine understanding of his subject (Wilkie Collins) through Charles Dickens. (If that makes sense.) I enjoyed A Brief Life and would recommend it to anyone who loves literature, especially those who want to know more about the man behind the covers.
* Dickens *1991 - large book, well worth the investment of time
Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution 2015 just released
Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I 2014
Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors 2013
by Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White (Penguin Classics)
The Moonstone (Penguin Classics)
5.0 star
Excellent biography of a neglected literary pioneer
ByMichael J. Edelmanon September 29, 2015|Vine Customer Review of Free Product
It's often said that time is the great judge of the arts. Those painters, sculptors, composers, writers, and others whose works have a timeless quality survive, and those whose works fall short are lost to history. But that's not always the case. Sometimes it comes down to fashion, and sometimes just luck. Rembrandt is one of the most revered of the old masters today, but at the time of his death he was thought to be old fashioned and passé. People still read Mark Twain (or at least say they do) but who reads Bret Harte, who was at least as popular as Twain during his lifetime?
Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular, and acclaimed, writers of his time. He was a lifelong friend of Charles Dickens, and collaborated with Dickens on a number of theatrical projects. His novels were ground breaking in many ways, featuring strong woman characters, and what is probably the first woman detective to appear in English literature. He had a great ear for dialogue, and a painter's eye for details and description (his father was a noted landscape artist). His last great novel, The Moonstone, is not only widely considered to be the first English language detective novel, it's also a thoroughly modern novel that focuses more on character and narrative than on the solution to the crime. Both it and The Woman in White introduce the idea of having several characters tell the same story, each perceiving and relating it very differently, something not seen before in English literature. And yet Collins remains largely unknown and unread today.
Collins was not only a very popular writer, he was also a non-conformist who stood out in a place and an era noted for its free thinkers and non-conformists. He was a short, oddly built, even malformed man who was nonetheless curiously attractive to women. He never married, but kept two mistresses, one (who bore his child but married and then left another man) in his household, nominally as a housekeeper, and the other in another house, where he lived under an assumed name. Both women were aware of the other, yet both tolerated this curiously relationship for decades.
Peter Ackroyd, who has written a number of excellent literary biographies, has read Collins closely and has a good appreciation for his work. I suspect this biography will do a lot to reacquaint the reading public with Collins and help reestablish him as a writer on a par with his friend Charles Dickens.
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