Though he's best known today for a quartet of novels, William Wilkie Collins wrote scores of other works including other novels, plays, essays and articles. A friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, Wilkie was a creature of excess: a glutton for food, wine and opium and a man who had longtime relationships, and sired children, with two women but married neither. His debts to the Gothic tradition and his skill at what his era called sensation fiction make his books fun to cover. A giant diamond, mysterious Brahmins, quicksand, a deformed housemaid, a murdered sailor, a family curse: as this very partial list of elements in
The Moonstone—one of his more restrained novels
—proves, with Collins there is never a shortage of colorful motifs. Yet the best of Collins' work is also full of insightful social commentary, probing among other issues the imbalance between male and female power, the sometime injustice of the law, and the tensions that occur when the cultures linked together by colonialism collide.
Collins helped pioneer the mystery novel. But even his books that have little or no explicit detection are more often than not structured around the revelation of secrets, the exposure of deception, and the need to assess multiple versions of the truth. Doubles, dualities, and doppelgängers pervade his work as well, and this theme—things that apparently but not actually identical, mirror images—runs through all of my very different cover designs for his books.
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Wilkie Collins
by Charles Allston Collins, 1853 |
