Wilkie Collins
  • Published: 1 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780099287476
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

Wilkie Collins

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Ackroyd at his best - a gripping short life of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White.

Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less 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 his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. As well as 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 humour and sympathetic understanding.
  • Published: 1 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780099287476
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, 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 Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

portrait photo of Peter Ackroyd

Also by Peter Ackroyd

Queer City
London
London Under
Charlie Chaplin
Thames: Sacred River
Venice
The Canterbury Tales: A retelling by Peter Ackroyd
See all

Praise for Wilkie Collins

Four stars, (A) perfect little biography

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Neat and informative

DJ Taylor, Independent on Sunday

Unfailingly perceptive

Andrew Taylor, Independent

With deft strokes, Peter Ackroyd’s biography portrays his character and sets him in context, weaving critical appraisals seamlessly into the story of his life. The bravura of this biography lies in its brilliantly judged brevity.

Iain Finlayson, The Times

Insightful

Judith Flanders, Sunday Telegraph

This biography is compulsive reading

The Economist

Concise but wide-ranging… A fitting tribute to [Collins’] legacy

Sally Morris, Daily Mail

Always absorbing

Lesley McDowell, Glasgow Sunday Herald