SOURCE: “Wilkie Collins in the 1860s: The Sensation Novel and Self-Help,” in Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan Doyle, edited by Clive Bloom, Brian Docherty, Jane Gibb, and Keith Shand, Macmillan Press, 1988, pp. 46-63.

In the following essay, Rance investigates Collins's sensation novels in relation to the historical mood of 1860s England.

Recent manifestations of critical interest in Collins have not tended to impugn his traditional status as a minor novelist, to be mentioned in the same breath as Reade. Feminist criticism has played off a male and reactionary Collins against enlightened female sensation novelists. Elaine Showalter pronounces the novels of Collins in the 1860s to be ‘relatively conventional in terms of their social and sexual attitudes.’¹ A misreading is first adduced in evidence. ‘The first sentence of The Woman in White announced Collins' endorsement of Victorian sex roles: “This is the story of what a Woman's patience...